


Invisible Man

by PutItBriefly



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, I legit do not know what side of the love square this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2020-11-07 18:30:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20821886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PutItBriefly/pseuds/PutItBriefly
Summary: Cat Noir spoke first. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”So he had listened to her orders to go back to school on the assumption she was Ladybug. If she just pretended to not know what he was talking about, would it be enough to protect her?“Marinette is my friend—I don’t know why I’m telling you that, you know that—and I was thinking about her one day—like people think about their friends!—and I just saw it. I couldn’t unsee it. Everything made so much sense after that. Why I—Why your professionalism goes out the window whenever Chloe Bourgeois is around. Where Ladybug was when Evillustrator went on a date with Marinette. How you really got on Startrain. Why Ladybug didn’t show up to my surprise until I showed it to Marinette. How you saved her when her dad was akumatized.”Oh, crap.oh crapCat Noir figuring out Marinette Dupain-Cheng is Ladybug is bad enough. She's not about to compound that error by letting him tell her who he is. Or give into the temptation to try and figure it out herself. She has better things to think about than the secret identity of a catboy.Like the fact that her relationship with Adrien might finally be starting to change.





	1. Chapter 1

Adrien wasn’t at school on Thursday.

Alya had shown up at Marinette’s house Wednesday evening waving a flier for an upcoming film showcase celebrating the career of Luc Besson. Adrien (and let’s face it, humanity as a whole) was absolutely the sort of nerd unable to pass up a chance to see _ The Fifth Element _ in theatres. Could there be a better way to set him and Marinette up? They could invite a whole group and then arrange things so that Adrien and Marinette were in one show while their friends were in another. 

An entire film festival_ (showcase!) _ had an awful lot of variables. Marinette was good for conjuring up a Rube Goldberg machine out of her surroundings and a Lucky Charm when Ladybug needed to capture an akuma, but she couldn’t drum up much enthusiasm for this plan. Firstly because “plans” to sweep Adrien off his feet had a long and storied history of _ not working _ and secondly because he had already confessed to her that he liked someone else.

The confession itself was important. He valued Marinette enough to tell her.

And also important was the part where he, you know, _ liked someone else. _I. e., not Marinette.

(And that—that was fine. It didn’t change her feelings about him any. It wasn’t a “no.” It was a “not right now.” Later, after whatever he had with Whoever-She-Is was over, then maybe he would see Marinette in a different light.)

And Marinette told Alya all this. 

“Girl!” Alya had cried with the affectionate exasperation Marinette knew so well. “He loves _ you!” _

Nice as it was to know Alya was always the first to think astonishingly well of her, Marinette couldn’t agree. “He said ‘the girl I’m in love with.’ That’s not how you say it when the person is right there.” She had replayed that conversation in her head a million times. Marinette didn’t mean to dwell on it. His words just had this way of sneaking up on her and echoing in her ears.

Alya (and one must remember Alya went from not crushing on Nino to crushing on him to dating him in the span of a single conversation because she was just _ that good _ at making things happen) had just raised her eyebrows. “And how many silly things that were not remotely what you meant have _ you _ said to _ him?” _

U N F A I R

Because the answer is _ too many. _Infinity silly things. Though still not quite clear on what made a number imaginary, Marinette was sure imaginary numbers were needed to figure out the answer.

“Exactly. He was just tongue-tied.” Alya had next assaulted Marinette with her phone. “Take a look at these pics.”

Alya’s gallery of candid Adrien shots could put Marinette’s bedroom walls to shame. She swiped through what felt like endless photos of Adrien, all wearing the same expression—a tiny, lopsided smile and eyes that defied description. “That is how he looks at you. I’ve been snapping these pics for weeks.” (Which explained Alya’s sudden mania for texting whenever Marinette and Adrien were together. She was just faking it while she took the picture.) “You walk into the room and he turns to mush. Go to the movies with him. You owe it to yourself to see what will happen.”

Probably, Marinette knew, probably nothing would happen. He was not going to suddenly confess his undying love—the other girl forgotten—and run off with her to a beautiful home with three children and a hamster. 

But

you know

he _ might. _

She spent the night unable to think about anything else. Adrien would go to the festival and they’d see some movies together and even if it didn’t launch the romance of the century, they’d still have fun. It was still a whole day of films by Luc Besson. 

But when she arrived at school, ready to wave the flier and invite him to join the group they were putting together, Adrien wasn’t there. Marinette may have just missed him in the courtyard, but when students filed into the classroom, the seat beside Nino remained empty no matter how hard she stared at it.

Alya leaned forward. “What’s the story with Adrien? Is he sick?”

Nino half-turned, propping on elbow on the back of his bench. “Nah, he’s got an audition this morning. He said he’d be here after lunch.”

“That’s cool.” Alya appeared to think she could elbow Marinette into forgetting her disappointment. “Surprised his dad let him go to to an audition on a school day. What’s it for?”

“Music video with Isa and Asimov. The single won’t be dropped for weeks and he’s been taunting me with the knowledge that he’s hearing it without me.”

“Wow, very indie. I thought our friendly neighborhood It Boy was mainstream.”

“His _ dad’s _ mainstream,” Nino corrected. “Adrien usually gets cast in stuff because his dad knows a guy who knows a guy or _ is _ the guy. Adrien’s going into this one sans connections. He’s way nervous about it, too, or else he would have told you girls about it ages ago.”

“Dang, and his dad still let him go?”

“Oh, yeah, old man’s thrilled. Apparently going out for this video on his own is the first time Adrien has ever ‘taken his career seriously.’” Nino’s laidback openness did not make for a very good impression of Mr. Agreste. “Plus, any excuse to keep Adrien out of school. He’s probably hoping one morning with a tutor will make Adrien long for homeschool.”

Alya grinned. “Not gonna happen.”

“A man can dream, Alya.” Nino laid his hand over his heart, and the girls laughed. “A man can dream.”

* * *

In every other respect, the morning was utterly mundane. In homeroom, Marinette traded morning compliments with Juleka. And then it was time for physical science, and while calculating _ why _ her device worked to specifications was a bit harder than building it, without Adrien to stare at, hers was a disaster-free table. And then came PE, followed by math, and lunch. Marinette rarely stayed at school for lunch break. With her parents’ culinary school-level cooking just across the street, the cafeteria held little appeal. But Nino had said Adrien would be coming to school after break, and she didn’t want to miss his arrival. She wanted to hear all about the audition, if he’d met Isabelle Ire in person or just a representative of her band, how well he did, when he’d get the callback and if he was free that Saturday and wanted to go to the cinema.

The group they had managed to put together so far included Nino (naturally), and Nathaniel, Max, and Alix, a trio whose ready agreement for the scheme was likely impacted by the fact that of their entire class only they, Alya and Marinette had stayed at school during lunch. (And Markov, but technically, he didn’t eat and wasn’t enrolled at their school.) Most of the films being featured were too violent for Mylène’s tastes, and Kitty Section needed to practice for an upcoming gig, so Rose, Juleka and Ivan didn’t have the time. They’d catch Kim when he came back from lunch and make sure he knew to extend his invitation to Ondine. Nath would catch Marc when he could. That left Luka—who wouldn’t abandon the rest of Kitty Section so close to a performance but Marinette really felt they should invite anyway lest he feel like he was purposefully left out—and Kagami as the last members of their social circle so far unaccounted for.

“May I invite Ada?” Max asked, interrupting a silent argument between Alya and Marinette. 

“She’s in Marc’s class,” Nath added, pre-empting Alya’s incoming New Kid _ ‘Who?’ _

“She has been under significant stress as of late and I believe a day at the cinema shall provide sufficient distraction.”

“Absolutely, the more the merrier!” Marinette replied. “What will we be distracting her from?” She turned away from Alya, unwilling to see her friend accuse her of not one, but two counts of self-sabotage. Well. Kagami may be a rival for Adrien’s affections and probably the girl he told her about, but she was also Marinette’s friend and she didn’t like the idea of trying to snipe Adrien out from underneath her. (Anymore.) Plus, if Adrien decided to take the film festival as an opportunity to sneak off with Kagami, it would 1) tell Marinette everything she needed to know about the state of his heart and 2) make him happier than being tricked into a date with her. As for Ada, Marinette didn’t really know her, but a friend of a friend in need was a friend indeed. Or close enough.

“She has been working on developing an app to help Parisians track and avoid akumatized persons in real time which ideally should tap into existing security infrastructures.”

“Hasn’t been going well, huh?”

They heard the screams first. 

Max sighed. “Negative.”

The students in the cafeteria burst from the room en masse, scrambling down the steps to the courtyard. A metallic, robotic looking girl had blast a hole in the library wall, debris raining down in front of the main exit of the school. Though the supervillain was still in the library, surveying her handiwork from afar, she had effectively blocked the exit. 

With more than just debris, too. As they got closer, Marinette and her friends could see a large 0 superimposed on each door. 

“Binary,” Max explained. “The bit has been turned off.”

“Meaning?” Alix prompted.

“Presumably, the doors will not open until the bit has been turned on. In binary, that is expressed with a 1.”

“We’ll have to go out a window,” Marinette interjected. “Ada only just turned and she looks like she’s not going anywhere. She can’t have 0’d everything.”

Students scattered, breaking off into smaller groups to investigate every first floor classroom. Marinette, Alya and Max turned and ran directly for the room beneath the cafeteria. It was the furthest from the library, so it should take the longest for Ada to affect it. Until Marinette could shake her friends long enough to transform, it was their best shot.

Marinette’s eyes narrowed as they ran, pushing herself faster. All around her, she heard footsteps thundering and doors being swung open. The chorus of voices was not encouraging. “Locked!” “Locked!” “This one’s locked!” “Another 0!”

Escape was not going to be simple. “Max, Markov, go back to one of the rooms we know has been 0’d and see if you can hack it open. You said it’s binary, right? So that means it’s a computer program.”

“Affirmative.”

“Good thinking, class rep!”

Max and Markov veered right, ducking into the classroom Nath and Alix had just verified to have been locked down. Marinette only needed to get away from Alya before she could face Ada as Ladybug, but how? 

The breath was knocked out of her. The ground fell away beneath her feet. Marinette sucked in air, her first thought being that she’d been hit from behind, but the idea had hardly had a chance to form in her mind before she realized—

“Cat Noir!” Alya recovered first, whipping out her phone to film the school below as Cat Noir carried both girls to the roof in a single bound. One, two, three steps with Alya in one arm and Marinette in the other across the roof and then another jump. Alya whooped as they sailed through the air and landed on the grass outside.

“Alya, make sure everyone who left school during lunch break knows it’s not safe to come back.”

“On it!”

Cat Noir shot her a thumbs up and then, not letting go of Marinette, sprung to the rooftop across the street. He released her, and pulled open the trap door leading to her own bedroom. “In you go.”

Marinette began her descent. “Thanks, Cat Noir.” He would assume she was thanking him for the rescue, but honestly, his neglecting to bring Alya with them once he told her to start text blasting and/or Ladyblogging the attack was awfully convenient.

“I’ll wait out here.”

“Wait—what?”

He waved his hand in a swirling motion. “For you to change.”

Okay.

Okay. She had made this mistake before, leapt to the conclusion that he was on the verge of figuring her out and made life about a thousand times worse for herself because he wasn’t thinking what she _ thought _ he was thinking at all.

“Change what?”

“Into—you know.”

There was definitely an alternate explanation here. Sure, it sounded to her like he was talking about transforming into Ladybug, but that was only because she knew she was going to have to transform into Ladybug. He didn’t. He was talking about something else. Something she couldn’t see because of her own awareness of Ladybug’s true identity and paranoia over being discovered.

“I don’t know.”

From the school came a thundering noise that was more than likely some part of the building collapsing. Cat Noir winced. He knew he should be over there, and instead he was loitering on her roof, making cryptic comments and wasting time.

“You’re—” he dropped his voice, “—Ladybug.”

He sounded _ sure. _

Marinette felt sick.

“I think.” 

Maybe not so sure.

“No. You are. I know you are.” His voice alternated, calm and sure on some words, coarse and raw for others._ “You have to be. _ I don’t—I don’t need to see you transform but the what-ifs are driving me crazy so just—just let me be sure.” 

“Go,” she hissed. “Go back to that school and _ do your job.” _

He didn’t hesitate a moment before using his stick to vault back to the school. 

Marinette dropped through the trap door, landing knees first on her mattress. Had he listened to her because Cat Noir always had faith in Ladybug? Or had he listened because her refusal to answer him made him think she wasn’t Ladybug and he didn’t want to waste anymore time? “This is bad, Tikki. This is really bad.”

The little kwami never looked upon disasters with the dread they deserved. “Oh, Marinette, you can handle anything, including Cat Noir.”

She’d have to set that aside for later. “Akuma first. Tikki, spots on!”

Ladybug made sure to take a detour before reaching the school, not wanting to give anyone else the chance to realize Ladybug emerged from the place Cat Noir had dropped Marinette off. Honestly! Did that boy actually _ think _ about _ anything? _

Ada’s robot form (apparently, Hawkmoth had named her Lovelace which didn’t make a bit of sense for a robot, but okay) was strong enough to give Cat Noir a good fight in melee combat. He was keeping her focus off the cowering students still trapped in the courtyard, which was good, but looking at her, Ladybug couldn’t guess where her akumatized object was. Her body was uniformly covered in metal sheets, all of which were inscribed with glowing green writing that looked like letters and special characters on a normal keyboard but didn’t make any sense.

Since no part of her body was different, the akuma had to be in one of the metal sheets, but which one? It was going to take some luck to figure it out.

“Lucky Charm!”

Ladybug’s miraculous powers of creation provided her with a ladybug-themed _ rubber duck. _She caught it in one hand and stared at it, dumbfounded. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

Max, sheltering with the students, shouted, “Rubber duck debugging!”

Ladybug dashed over to him. “What?”

“It is common for computer programmers to read a buggy code aloud to a rubber duck. Although a programmer does not see the mistake in the code when they look at it, they will often find the answer when they hear themselves say it.”

“So if I read the writing on her body, I should be able to hear where the akuma is hiding. But none of that writing makes sense.”

“It will when you say it.”

“Keep her distracted, kitty,” Ladybug muttered. With the battle between Lovelace and Cat Noir being as fast paced and hard hitting as it was, it was hard to read the panels. Ladybug bounded here and there, trying to catch different angles to see different spots on Lovelace’s body and move quickly enough to keep up with them.

But when she heard it, she _ heard _ it. 

Ladybug used her yoyo string to bind Lovelace’s arms flat along her sides. “Cat Noir! Get her left arm, the panel that says _ ‘akumamake hello.ada!’” _

Cat Noir charged his ring with destructive energy and touched the panel with his pointer finger. It crumbled to dust, and out flew the akuma. The robotic monster receded, leaving Ada slumped and confused. Ladybug wasted no time catching and purifying the akuma. When her Miraculous Ladybugs restored the school, they also restored a silicone bracelet she belatedly remembered Ada always wearing. Taking a closer look at it, Ladybug saw it said ‘gnatmake hello.adb.’

Learning the significance of the bracelet would have to wait. Reading every panel had taken some time and her earrings beeped to warn her she had only two minutes left.

Ladybug fled, closely followed by Cat Noir.

It looked like he wasn’t going to let this go. And if they were going to continue fighting the forces of evil together, she couldn’t afford to avoid talking to him forever. 

(Were they going to continue? Did her identity being discovered mean one or both of them was about to get fired? She was a full fledged Ladybug! Future Guardian of the Miracle Box! It was too late to fire her for being lax about her identity, wasn’t it?)

They ended up on the roof of the apartment next to her own, sheltered behind the chimney she often used when trying to avoid detransforming at her own home. 

Cat Noir spoke first. “I didn’t do it on purpose.” 

So he _ had _ listened to her orders to go back to school on the assumption she was Ladybug. If she just pretended to not know what he was talking about, would it be enough to protect her?

“Marinette is my friend—I don’t know why I’m telling you that, you know that—and I was thinking about her one day—_ like people think about their friends!— _ and I just _ saw _ it. I couldn’t unsee it. Everything made so much sense after that. Why I—Why _ your _ professionalism goes out the window whenever Chloe Bourgeois is around. Where Ladybug was when Evillustrator went on a date with Marinette. How you _ really _ got on Startrain. Why Ladybug didn’t show up to my surprise until I showed it to Marinette. How you saved her when her dad was akumatized.”

Oh, crap.

oh crap 

The boy _ could _ think. There was no way she could explain away all of that! Not well enough to throw him off the trail now, anyway!

“How long have you known?”

“Couple days.”

With her back against the chimney, Ladybug sunk down to sit on the roof, her knees bent in front of her. “If you can figure me out, that means Hawk Moth can.”

Cat Noir laughed. It sounded forced. “I don’t think he’ll be able to use my method.”

“How did you—nevermind, I don’t want to know.” There had to be some way to salvage this!

“Claws—”

“Stop! What are you doing!”

Cat Noir frowned. “Transforming back.”

“Then I’ll know who you are!” She didn’t like how shrill she sounded. _ Ladybug _ did not _ panic. _

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “That’s why I was gonna do it.”

“I can’t know who you are!”

“This is so dumb!”

“There’s nothing dumb about it! What would happen if Hawk Moth captured you somehow? He’d take your ring and try to force you to tell him my identity!”

“I wouldn’t!”

“You can’t know that!”

His eyes blazed. “I _ do _ know that! I would never betray you!”

“Says the boy who figured out my identity even though he knew I wanted it to be a secret!”

“I didn’t do it on purpose! I know you in biker gear, I know you when you’re Lady Noire! Why shouldn’t I know you when you’re _ you?” _

Because she knew him in a banana costume and she knew Mister Bug, and she didn’t have the slightest idea who he really was. She didn’t know where to begin to guess.

“We don’t know if Hawk Moth can use magic to make us tell. He could have a mind-control akuma or akumatize you if you feel bad about being captured.”

“I am a very optimistic person!”

Well. He definitely wasn’t wrong about _ that. _ The boy practically felt the need to check and see if she’d fallen in love with him yet everyday. Still… “If you get captured, if worse comes to worse, I can use my Miraculous Ladybug to magic you back to where you started. They’ll undo the damage without me needing to confront Hawk Moth face-to-face and risk my Miraculous. Even if you give me up, I would still have time to fix things. If he uses magic, maybe that would even mean my ladybugs can make him forget he ever knew.”

Ladybug hugged her knees to her chest. “If I got captured, you can’t rescue me and get the earrings back at a distance. You’d have to come right to us. The _ only _ advantage you have is you can get close as real-you without him knowing Cat Noir is almost there. You need all the time I can give you. I can’t know who you really are. I refuse to know. You knowing me can’t change that.”

Her transformation ran out.

And then she was Marinette, sitting on the rooftop with her back resting against a chimney. She fished a macaron out of her purse for Tikki.

“It’s nice to see you, Cat Noir.”

“Nice to see you, too, Tikki.” He sat down next to Marinette, cross-legged, and beckoned Tikki to him with cupped palms. She settled in his hands to eat.

When did they get so chummy? Ladybug had met Plagg a handful of times, but as far as she knew, Cat Noir and Tikki had only met once. Marinette rested her head on her folded arms. “Traitor,” she muttered fondly.

“I think it’s very sweet that you know Ladybug well enough to see Marinette,” Tikki said. She really wanted to earn that traitor label, didn’t she? “I always tell her that she’s Ladybug with or without the mask. Maybe now she’ll believe me.”

“She should. She’s always Ladybug.”

“Stop talking about me like I’m not here. Anyway, I need to get back to school, and _ you _ need to go before you transform back!”

Marinette collected her kwami and climbed back to her side of the rooftop in an uncoordinated and decidedly unLadybuglike fashion. That’ll show them.

* * *

Adrien was already in class when Marinette arrived. Between Ada and Cat Noir, she’d almost forgotten her desire to be there when he arrived. He didn’t look too happy. Was it possible the audition had not gone well? Isa and Asimov was a British indie group with haunting vocals and macabre lyrics. They had their fans, but they were far from a sensation. Adrien appearing in one of their videos would rocket them to popularity among French audiences. They’d be crazy not to pick him. They should be _ begging _ him to be in their video.

It looked like Nino and Alya were already mid-grilling him about it when Marinette came in the room. Alya had her phone up, recording the entire thing. “Was Isabelle Ire there?”

“No, just a casting agent. They said she’d be there in person for callbacks.”

“When’s that?”

“Next week, if I get called.” 

Marinette slid onto the bench beside Alya. “Of course they loved you, who wouldn’t love you—like you. I’d be crazy not pick you, I mean, they would be crazy not to pick you.”

He brightened a bit. “Do you really think so, Marinette? I’ve never auditioned for anything before. It was really nerve wracking to know everyone there was only watching me so that they could judge me.” 

“Of course! Because you are so cute and talented and sweet, and what else could a music video need?”

“I don’t know what the video needs, but I need some luck.” He produced the lucky charm she’d given him from his pocket. “I feel like I used it all up today. Could you—I don’t know—recharge it?”

“Suuuuuuuuuuuuure.” Marinette took the charm. What did Adrien think recharging a lucky charm would look like? She sandwiched it between her palms and threaded her fingers together. At a loss of what else to do, Marinette squeezed her eyes shut and chanted _good luck_ under her breath a few times. “There you go! All charged!”

Adrien took the lucky charm back like it was something precious, something that was going to get him this role he wanted for sure. Her face burned and she couldn’t look at him. “Thank you so much, Marinette!”

“If you need something to keep your mind off of it,” Alya interjected, “last night I found out the cinema is showing all Luc Besson films this Saturday. Marinette and I are putting a group together for a movie marathon. You in?”

“Absolutely! That sounds awesome!” 

After school, Alya showed Marinette the recording of her post-audition interview with Adrien. Only, with her added commentary, it was a lot less about Adrien gushing over the band and their music and his concern he didn’t have the look they were after and a lot more about the way his eyes kept drifting to the empty spot on the bench where Marinette was supposed to bet. Or the way he stared at her when she finally came in the classroom. And especially the way he was looking at her while she recharged his lucky charm.

Or, as Alya put it, “The lovesick pile of mush formerly known as Adrien Agreste.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two notes before we get started:
> 
> 1) I know I said in the notes for chapter one that this takes place in 2015, but the more I thought about the mess that is the show's timeline, the more I realized it would have to be spring 2016. Marinette and Adrien have been Ladybug and Cat Noir since September 2014.  
2) I used English titles for all the movies. I planned on using French titles (and it wasn't easy to find some of them) but then I remembered that I had already started a precedent of English titles when I name dropped The Fifth Element in chapter one.

The cinema was not a popular destination on a Thursday afternoon. A teenager maybe two years older than Marinette sold her a ticket—to what, she barely knew, she had just wanted to get in the building—and another was looking bored by the concession stand. A handful of lone adults passed by, all drifting vaguely in the same direction. She felt incredibly conspicuous. Marinette took a few steps towards the same theater everyone else appeared to be heading to, trying to blend in. What she wanted to do was find Master Fu.

So naturally,  _ he _ found  _ her.  _

“Ah, Marinette, may I interest you in the 16h15  _ Zootopia?” _

She jumped out of her skin and spun around. “Actually, Master,” (was whispering suspicious? She felt suspicious) “We need to talk.”

Master Fu gently tucked his arms behind his back and smiled as though he knew why she had come. “Please, step into my office.”

The “office” of the Last Guardian of the Miraculous was a deserted theater scheduled to show  _ Zootopia _ at 16h15. “You kids today have too many extracurriculars. No one comes to the movies anymore.” His tone invoked the rant of every elder looking upon the young with disapproval, but his smile betrayed it to be nothing more than a good-natured tease. Master Fu raked his eyes over every row, ensuring the theater really was empty before he dropped into an aisle seat near the door. Wayzz emerged from wherever he had been hiding.

Marinette sat in the next seat over. “We’re putting together a whole group for the Luc Besson festival.” She unfastened her purse to let Tikki out.

“How many? I will make sure we have seats for you.”

It was kind of Master Fu to use his cover as a cinema employee to ensure her friends would be able to see the films they wished. It was going to be a busy day for him. Still, embarrassment crept onto her face. Ladybug had a tendency to select Marinette’s closest friends when a mission called for allies. Several of the kids in her group were going to have familiar names. “Me, Alya, Nino, Max,  _ may _ be Kagami, and Adrien, Kim, Alix, Nathaniel, Ondine, Ada and Marc.”

“That’s quite the group. Chloe and Luka will not be joining you?”

Marinette tried to hide her wince. “Chloe’s not really a  _ friend _ friend, and Luka has band practice.”

“Perhaps another time. Between you and me, we are only trying to build hype for  _ Valerian _ next year.”

As awesome as a Valerian and Laureline movie was going to be, Marinette had not come to the theater to gush over France’s favorite time-traveling space cops. What she had come to talk about was going to be a lot less fun.

On the screen, Judy Hopps was faking a gruesome death in the school play.

“Master, Cat Noir figured out who I really am.”

“Wayzz, Tikki, enjoy the movie. Kwamis should not be privy to Guardian business.” After a few brief protests—largely rooted in the absence of popcorn—Wayzz and Tikki obeyed, floating across the dark theater to seats of their own. 

Marinette was hesitant. “About Cat Noir…”

“It is most unfortunate, but sadly to be expected.”

Master Fu’s reaction was almost nonchalant. Disinterest was better than anger or disappointment, but either of those emotions would have been easier to navigate. This response left her confused. Marinette had never questioned the importance of secrecy. Was she supposed to? “Should we be able to figure it out?”

“Ideally, no. But we are not in ideal circumstances. The appearance of Hawk Moth forced me to find holders for the Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculous quickly. The two of you were the first to pass the test. I found you very close to one another. I know you have met.”

Well, that explained how he knew Marinette well enough to recognize her, but not why she couldn’t do the same for him. How often were they near each other? Did he go to her school? Live nearby? Buy bread at T&S? Marinette felt confident about the last, at least. He raved about the macarons.

“It is always preferable for a Miraculous holder’s identity to be known only to the Guardian that assists their kwami. But for one holder to know another is not a disaster.”

Rapidly, Marinette broke in, “I don’t know his identity.” She felt a bit like a teacher’s pet, eager to draw attention to the fact that  _ she _ had been behaving when a classmate had not. “He wants me to know, but I—”

“Do not feel you must justify yourself to me, Marinette. You are a future Guardian and this is a secret you are permitted to know. But you are also Ladybug, and you may choose to be a partner first and not take on the responsibility of supporting Plagg. That is fine. I have been watching over Plagg for a very long time.”

“I want to know who he is, but I also don’t.” Doomsday scenarios kept running through her mind, horrible fates that could have been avoided had they just respected the rules and kept their true identities secret.

“It is wise to be cautious with such knowledge. You may find a greater understanding of one another will have a positive impact on your teamwork. Yet you may also find that knowing him makes fighting by his side much, much harder.”

“If he turns out to be someone I don’t like?” Marinette couldn’t imagine holding a grudge against anyone, no matter how badly they had wronged her, if they turned out to be Cat Noir.

Master Fu chuckled. “Not at all. Tell me—have you ever noticed Cat Noir’s eyes?”

“His cat eyes? Yeah, of course.”

“They make him look inhuman. Did you know superheroes are often referred to as modern mythology? Most people do not know that the mythological heroes they have been made to study all their lives are exactly the same as our superheroes of today. Those characters are not remembered for their humanity, but how they transcend it. They inspire us to be greater than we are. If you were to take away Cat Noir’s eyes—his mask, his myth—you would find a boy. A boy your own age with a name and a human face and a family that wonders where he is and if he is safe when an akuma appears. You fear seeing that boy. Something will change when you look at Cat Noir and see him for the boy he is, and you do not have faith that change will be for the better.”

“So you’re telling me to have faith?”

“How should I know? Marinette, I do not know how your relationship with Cat Noir will change in the future any better than you do. You may find knowing him outside all of this makes you more in sync than ever. On the other hand, you may find knowing him makes it impossible to watch him take the risks his duty requires. If that were the case, it would be only a matter of time before your partnership must end.”

Anything that endangered their partnership was absolutely out of the question. Watching Cat Noir do things like throw himself from Gamer 2.0’s platform was bad enough already. Watching that same boy while knowing the life he was throwing away was full and complete, with friends and family and hopes and dreams… His role on their team was to take damage, keep supervillains occupied, buy her time to defeat them at the cost of himself. Ladybug had to accept that. She had to be able to let him do it, put as much faith in her ability to fix everything as he did. “But right now, he’s okay, right? He’s not going to get fired for figuring me out?”

“No. I shall speak to him and learn how he discovered your true identity so that we may ensure no one else does, but no, he is not fired. He has been an exceptional holder of the Black Cat. I will not find another so well suited to Plagg or you.”

_ That _ was an interesting thought. “Are certain people better at using a certain Miraculous?” Ladybug and Cat Noir were a great team, but that was true of nearly all of their allies. The only one who had been unable to handle a Miraculous was Adrien. Aspik had been a disaster; the Snake was always meant for Luka, she saw that with hindsight. Did everyone have one specific Miraculous they were meant for? Was there a reason Alya was Rena Rouge when Marinette had been tempted to give her both the Ladybug and the Bee? There was nothing about Alya that suggested she would be more attuned to illusions than creation or subjugation. Nino’s drive to protect Alya had made him perfect for the Turtle, but at the end of the day, protection was a shared goal. Did that mean they were all suited to the Turtle? Max had been given the Horse simply because he had already been helping when they needed a third hero. Alix would be Bunnyx someday. Because she was ideally suited to the Rabbit or because that Miraculous was a family heirloom?

“Yes and no. You, Marinette, have the potential to wield any Miraculous successfully. Cat Noir would struggle with anything but the Black Cat. It is his nature to be gentle and guileless which tempers the destructive and chaotic aspects of his Miraculous.” Master Fu’s eyes twinkled. “You enjoyed your turn with the ring, I think, but you were rash with your Cataclysm. It worked out. With time and practice, you would learn to make constructive use of destruction, but you could never be as well suited to it as him.”

Unfair! “Cat Noir usually just Cataclysms what I tell him to!”

“He does. Hesitance. Deference to the wishes of others. These things are not often listed among the virtues of great heroes, but they are a necessity for one whose gift is destruction. One must never rush to destroy, or become so blinded by your own perception that you fail to see what deserves to be preserved. Decay is as necessary as creation but the burden it carries is greater.”

“But Ladybug is the one who purifies akumas. Isn’t that job the harder one?”

“The Butterfly Miraculous is not meant for the creation of supervillains. Most Ladybugs are never asked to purify.”

“I guess I don’t understand what you mean by burden.” A burden was the same as responsibility, wasn’t it?

“The Ladybug is the Miraculous of Creation. No act of creation is ever wasted. To know you have created that which was not there before will never haunt you. The ability to heal will never frighten you. Destruction used with prudence can be a good thing. But like the Butterfly, it can also devastate and do terrible harm.”

“Like a forest fire,” Marinette realized. “A forest burning down is bad, but people also use fire on purpose to clear away the brush and renew the soil so that the forest grows stronger.”

“Precisely. And it is those very same qualities that make Cat Noir ideal for directing the spread of a controlled burn that renders him unsuitable to roles that do not require such leashing.”

They parted soon after, Master Fu taking Wayzz and returning to his duties at the cinema. Marinette bought a small popcorn for Tikki and sat with her for the rest of  _ Zootopia.  _ Being a secret forced Tikki to lead a very restricted life. Before her friendship with Adrien had put into focus how painful isolation was, Marinette could not have understood how meaningful simply sitting in a theater with a friend was to someone who never had that. Tikki deserved little pleasures, too.

“It’s funny, Tikki,” Marinette remarked after the movie. “Master Fu and I talked a lot about Cat Noir, and I just don’t see him the way Master describes him. He’s so goofy and over the top. It’s hard to imagine him gentle and restrained.” 

“Master Fu knows him in and out of the mask. He has a fuller picture of who Cat Noir really is. You would, too, if you learned more about him.”

“Too risky. Come on, fill me in on  _ Zootopia _ . I missed the beginning.” 

* * *

Marinette rocked on her feet.

He wasn’t coming back, was he?

Kagami had used her tried and true method of sneaking away from her overbearing mother by claiming she was going fencing with Adrien, but since that could not explain an entire afternoon away, she could only justify seeing one movie. Her pop culture education was sorely lacking—she’d not seen  _ any _ Luc Besson films before. That made their first choice of the day easy: introduce Kagami to  _ The Fifth Element. _

Each screen at the cinema was dedicated to showing one film from Besson’s filmography all day long. Purchasing a pass to the showcase itself bestowed the right to hop from screen to screen for the duration of the event. They did the math: you had to see three movies for the ticket price to be worthwhile. But Kagami was like Adrien; seeing only one movie was worth the price of doing something with  _ friends. _

(Marinette had decided to try and keep the group between herself and Kagami. Make Adrien choose which one of them he wanted to sit with. She had to answer the question of if she had a shot at him or if she had already lost him to a rival. She had not counted on the fact that, of the group, Kagami was really only friends with Adrien  _ and Marinette. _ She insisted on sitting with them both.)

Kagami didn’t really _get_ _The Fifth Element. _Marinette and Adrien tried valiantly to explain its enduring worth in the annals of cinema, but Kagami remained steadfast in her opinion that it was mostly just silly. Oh, well. Education was a process.

And then Adrien offered to walk Kagami to school, where the car was coming to pick her up after “fencing.” He swore he would come right back for more movies. While the rest of their group debated what to see next, Marinette volunteered to wait for Adrien.

To school was, at best, a five minute walk. So short that offers of other company got a “Don’t worry about it, I’ll be right back! Besides, you wouldn’t have been at fencing.”

He wasn’t coming back.

He probably got there, saw the car come for Kagami, and realized that he would much rather do whatever she was doing than come back to the cinema to watch more silly movies like  _ The Fifth Element. _

“Sorry I took so long!”

_ He came back. _

He said he would, why had she doubted him?

“That’s okay!” Marinette squeaked. “That’s fine!”

“I ran into my substitute Chinese tutor and he wanted to talk.”

Wow, a substitute tutor? “Your dad takes your education really seriously, doesn’t he?”

Adrien shrugged. “He wants me to excel. I don’t mind high expectations—they’re just Father’s way of saying he believes in me—but I wish I had more time for things like this!”

“I’m glad your father let you come.”

Cheeks pink, Adrien sheepishly admitted, “He didn’t. I snuck out.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get in trouble?” Marinette had vivid memories of being chased by his bodyguard. Adrien had disappeared from the class trip to London because Nathalie and his bodyguard met him in  _ England _ to take him home.

“I used to be. But the only way they punish me is by keeping me from going out, and they do that anyway. So, what’s next?”

“Um, Alya and the others went to  _ The Professional.”  _

Adrien’s brow furrowed. “You don’t sound happy.”

“Isn’t that movie scary?” Mylène had not wanted to come to the cinema and her reason was 99% _The Professional._

“It’s a thriller. It’s more suspenseful than scary.”

“But there’s a lot of violence.”

_ “Stylized _ violence.” Adrien said it as if that made a meaningful difference.

They slipped into the theater showing _ The Professional. _ It had already started. Their eyes scanned the dark room, seeking out their friends. Luckily, they had been expected and were more conspicuous standing near the door than any faces seated in the dark. Alya ducked out of her aisle seat and dashed to Marinette and Adrien. 

“Sorry,” Alya whispered. “We couldn’t save you seats. It’s just so crowded.”

“No worries,” Adrien replied. “Marinette and I will sit someplace else. Unless you’d rather see a different movie?” He turned to Marinette. “You might like  _ The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec _ better.”

“What a great idea, Adrien!” Alya could not have been more obvious about her intentions if she had bodily shoved them both out of the theater. “You two go on, and we’ll meet up later.”

“S-sounds great!”

Unexpected warmth engulfed Marinette’s hand. She looked down to see that Adrien had taken it. “Come on.” He tugged gently. “Let’s check the schedule and see when it starts.”

Marinette allowed Adrien to lead her out of the theater by the hand. She could almost see the neon arrows pointing at them, describing for all to see how her friends had not saved them seats on purpose so that she’d end up sitting alone with Adrien. Romantic music was swelling in the background. Was that just in her head or was it coming from one of the movies? 

“I really am sorry, Marinette.” He hadn’t let go of her hand, but even still, words like that effectively punctured the balloon of romantic daydreams she was currently floating away on. “I really do think you’ll like  _ Adèle _ better, but if I hadn’t taken so long, we’d be able to sit with our friends. Coming here isn’t about what movies we watch, it’s about seeing them together. I’ve already seen them all a million times. But that was at home, by myself. I’m happy to share them with you.”

“Don’t—don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault. I mean, sure, you saw your tutor and he wanted to talk to you, but I don’t think that made too much difference.”

“Oh, look, we have ten minutes until  _ Adèle _ starts. Perfect timing! It’s in theater 3.”

With ten minutes before showtime,  _ The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec _ was not as crowded as  _ The Professional _ had been, but it was filling up. They found seats without too much trouble, though they were a little closer to the back of the theater than Marinette usually liked.

“What were you saying before?”

“The thing with them not having seats for us. That’s not your fault because you stopped to talk. They probably would have done it anyway. Alya—Alya wanted to use this whole thing to set us up. Like on a date.”

He gasped _ . _

Why wouldn’t this stupid theater just swallow her whole?

“I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you any trouble, I swear!”

Wait.  _ Adrien _ thought  _ she _ had a problem? “What—you—you didn’t cause anything! This isn’t your fault at all!”

He shrugged. “I pushed you to come see  _ Adèle,  _ though. Should we go back to  _ The Professional _ and see if we can find seats after all?”

“What? No!  _ Adèle _ sounds like a much better movie and you—you wanted to share it with me. I want to see it with you.”

In the dim light of a theater, it was hard to say for certain, but Marinette thought his cheeks were warming. “With just me? Knowing what the rest of our friends are thinking?”

“Well—I mean—it’s not what I would have picked—which is to say, I don’t have a problem unless  _ you _ have a problem and like you said, we came here to see movies together and we  _ are _ here together so it all worked out unless you don’t want to?”

“I want to. I really want to.”

“Great. Perfect. It’s settled.” (She had no idea if he wanted it to be a date or if he wanted to watch a movie, but either way was fine.) 

(Okay, one option was  _ better, _ but.)

“And I’m not making you uncomfortable?”

He was just too sweet. “Don’t be silly! Of course not!”

“I guess it is silly.” Adrien shrugged. “I’m still not used to doing things with friends. I worry that I’m not doing it right.”

“You’re amazing—you’re doing amazing—are. Ugh. I mean, I can barely tell at all that you haven’t always had lots of friends.”

“It means a lot that you say that. You’re really important to me.”

A confession was on her tongue. Would she ever have a better time to tell him how she felt? But maybe she shouldn’t. If she was so important to Adrien  _ as a friend _ , then wasn’t it kinder to just be his friend? But wasn’t that lying? To call herself his friend while in her heart she wanted something else? Didn’t he deserve to know the truth?

“I think you should know…”

Adrien looked so attentive and kind, like what she was saying really mattered to him. Almost like he expected something important and brilliant and what had she ever done to make him think so highly of her?

“I also…” 

She couldn’t do it. This was insane. What was she thinking, trying to confess her love right before a movie? When they’d have to sit through it together in the awkward aftermath? When they’d have to regroup with their friends after it was over and figure out what to see next, them both knowing what she’d done?

“Friends.” That was not a good save. Salvage! Salvage! “I just mean, friends,  _ pft, _ anyone can be friends. We have a friendship that’s special. Not a normal friendship.” 

Adrien smiled at her, a strange sort of lopsided smile. Not quite like the one in all those photos Alya had showed her. “Like we know something about each other that no one else knows.”

Okay, well, if her haphazard attempt at salvaging a badly thought out love confession made sense to him, she better roll with it. “Yeah. Like we’re close to each other in a way that no one else could be.”

And then

A N D 

T H E N

he put his arm around her shoulders and drew her as close to him as the arm rest between their seats would allow. Marinette’s eyes bounced rapidly between the hand on her shoulder and his face. Adrien looked just...breathlessly happy. Her own fingers curled around the arm rest, half hoping it would crumble to dust if she just squeezed it hard enough, half fearing where her hands would go if she didn’t grab the nearest object and hold on with all her might.

“I was so scared.” He was whispering right into her ear. His breath tickled, made goosebumps rise along her neck and down her arms. “I thought you didn’t want anything to change.”

Her heart was pounding. She was dizzy. She could hardly think. It was unfair of him to be so near, to say things meant only for her. It was so warm in here. Was it just her? Or was it the crowd, which had steadily grown as the start time of the film drew nearer. “What do you want?” Marinette could not be 100% sure she said anything. She thought she said it. Maybe she didn’t.

But Adrien answered, so she probably did. “What I’ve always wanted.”

And then he drew her still closer somehow, and brushed his lips against hers. It was over almost the moment it had begun, as if he lost his nerve or maybe was expecting something that didn’t happen. “Wow,” Adrien murmured, “you really let me do that.”

Marinette leaned forward and kissed him back. It lasted longer than his, was more like her thousands upon thousands of fantasies of his warmth, his breath, his gentleness and teasing kindness. Her hands, once so desperate to prevent a faux pas by hanging onto the arm rest for dear life lost their battle and touched his face. Adrien melted against her, never letting go, accepting everything she offered and giving back himself in return. 

The distant, unimportant buzz of other people’s conversations faded away as a musical fanfare built and crescendoed. That wasn’t in her brain. It was in the theater. The movie was starting.

“We’re such a cliche,” Marinette whispered. “Making out in a movie theater!”

Adrien grinned. Just as quietly, he said, “I can do you one better.”

“Really?”

“I’ve been in love with you since the first moment our eyes met.”

The cheesiness of that line would have made her roll her eyes had she any doubt at all of his sincerity. Marinette pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “I’ve been in love with you,” she answered, “since you gave me your umbrella in the rain.”

He laughed, a joyous sound that no doubt annoyed everyone close enough to hear it but her. “Well, that answers the rest of my questions! Me all along, huh?”

Marinette never lifted her head. “You all along. You forever.”

* * *

The movie was

_ prooooooooobably _ good?

Marinette thought she watched it, but as they walked out of the theater, she could not recall a single thing about it. She knew the way light from the screen lit up Adrien’s hair. She remembered the feel of his every knuckle when they held hands. She knew his eyes when he turned to her, wanting to gauge her reaction during the parts he deemed important but finding her watching him instead.

She was lucky Adrien really had seen it countless times. He answered Alya’s every teasing question about the story and feigned total ignorance of Marinette’s red face and hand that never strayed from his.

The victory was short lived. “How did they know I’m here?”

Alarmed, Marinette followed the line of his sight. There, across the lobby, visible over Alya’s shoulder was his bodyguard and a quite angry looking Nathalie Sancoeur. Marinette pulled out her phone. As she suspected, one of her tracked tags had an Instagram alert. ‘#AdrienAgreste at the #LucBessonFest with his gf! #ReturnofPajamaGirl’ The accompanying photo was of the pair holding hands while looking at the schedule for  _ Adèle. _

“I better go,” Adrien sighed, letting go of Marinette’s hand. “On the bright side, you really are my girlfriend this time!”

Their friends swarmed her, demanding details, but all Marinette could do was watch Adrien walk away.

* * *

Hawk Moth had not struck since Ada.

At the best of times, Marinette kind of hated it when he was silent. Her optimism hoped he had given up. Her experience feared he was preparing something big. By Saturday, she hated it specifically because it meant she had not spoken to Cat Noir since learning he knew her secret identity. It was a long time to go without hashing out something that big. She had taken the afternoon as a day for herself. Hung out with friends. Kissed Adrien in a dark movie theater and held his hand until his overbearing family made him leave.

Saturday night was going to have to be spent catching up with her partner.

“Just can’t bear to be parted from me, can you, Bugaboo?”

Ugh. Trust Cat Noir to intentionally misinterpret a message marked ‘urgent.’ He looked like he was about to break into a choreographed dance. Had they met on the street instead of a rooftop, he’d be spinning around a lamp post by now. Ladybug wanted to attribute his mood to something unrelated to her—an excellent day or a new video game, but she’d texted him requesting they meet up to talk and unfortunately, that was probably the source of his high spirits. She didn’t do things like that often.

As always, it was up to her to get down to business. “I feel like we need to set some ground rules.”

His brow furrowed for a moment, but he recovered quickly. “Ground rules. Okay. Makes sense. Lay ‘em on me. I’m ready. I can take it. Do your strictest.”

“I spoke to Master Fu on Thursday. He told me he was going to talk to you. Did he?”

“Today, yeah.”

“Good. I’m glad he’s talking to you more, I know that hurt you when he was only talking to me. And I don’t want you to feel like you have to report to me everything you two talk about. He’s your mentor, too.”

So far, so good. Cat Noir looked serious and attentive. Ladybug continued. “He was really supportive with me when I told him. It all went a lot better than I expected.”

Cat Noir must have had a similar experience because he said, “Master is surprisingly chill.”

He really was, when one considered all he had been through on account of the Miracle Box. “But the thing is, I still don’t feel comfortable knowing who you really are. And that’s okay! Master says I might never be comfortable with it, that something that’s going to change our partnership shouldn’t be taken lightly. And well— _ never, _ that’s a long time, I hope someday we’ll defeat Hawk Moth and it won’t matter if I know. But right now, I think it’s important that we keep as many secrets as we can.”

Her partner wasn’t nodding along anymore. He didn’t look like he was about to break into the dance from  _ Singin’ in the Rain _ . He mostly looked confused.

“We work really well together, kitty. I don’t want to do anything that could change that. Our duty to Paris  _ has _ to come first.”

He looked like he’d been struck. He looked like he’d been struck and had no idea what hit him. “What?”

“We’re superheroes, Cat Noir. The greater good has to come first. If”— _ human eyes—“ _ if knowing you as you hurt our ability to fight together, I could never forgive myself.”

She might as well have not said anything for all the good it did him. Cat Noir looked exactly as flummoxed as he had before.  _ “What?” _

“Please. I’m asking you as your friend, as your partner, as someone I hope you respect, don’t try to give yourself away, okay?”

He sputtered. “How would I—how do you— _ why don’t you know?” _

“Look, all I want is for you not go around being obvious about it, okay? Don’t—I don’t know—start coming around to the bakery wearing cat ears or something. Master Fu told me that he’s seen us together, so I know we’re near each other sometimes.” 

Cat Noir clapped his hand over his mouth. Whether it was to stop himself from shouting from frustration or blurting out the answer, she didn’t know, but at least he was respecting her request for silence, however much he didn’t really want to.

“You aren’t a puzzle,” Ladybug said. “I don’t want to try and  _ solve _ you. You’re my  _ partner.  _ I need you to be a partner in this.” 

He dragged his hand away from his lips. “I’ll be your partner in everything if you just let me.”

That hurt. (She’d have to tell him she has a boyfriend now, but that conversation would have to wait until later. This one was hard enough on him without rubbing unrequited love in his face.) Ladybug took a breath and forged on. “Okay. So that’s rule one. Rule two, the opposite of trying to make me solve you is probably just as bad. If you suddenly disappeared, then I’d notice. So, whatever we are to each other in our other lives, we need to keep being, whatever it is.”

“I promise you’ll like me. Just let me show you.”

She groaned. “It’s not about  _ liking _ you!” Maybe the I-have-a-boyfriend, I’m-sorry conversation couldn’t wait too much longer, but she was still determined it wouldn’t be today. “The right thing to do isn’t always what you want it to be. This is hard for me, too. I’m sorry you don’t like it. I just don’t see another way right now.”

Cat Noir looked away. “You’re Ladybug. You always have the right idea at the right time. I guess I have no choice but to believe you.”

“You always have a choice. I’m just asking you to respect  _ mine.” _

“Sure. Yeah. Be what I am to you. Got it. Any more rules?”

“Um, not right now. Maybe I’ll think of more later.” The air between them was awkward and strained. This was not what protecting their partnership should feel like. “Thanks for being a good sport. I really appreciate it.”

“Bug...I didn’t figure you out on purpose. I wouldn’t do that to you. I just…” Cat Noir sighed. “I know you didn’t want that and I’m sorry it’s caused you so much trouble. I couldn’t help it.” He shook his head. “I should probably go.”

Ladybug folded her arms against her tummy. “Yeah. Okay. You go ahead.”

He waited for a minute, like he was really hoping she would change her mind. But she didn’t, and he left.

Alone, Ladybug slid down to the street and transformed back to Marinette. “That was really hard, Tikki. I hope I did the right thing.”

“You must do what your heart tells you, Marinette.”

Marinette smirked. “I already know you’re on his side. I didn’t forget how chummy you two are!”

“He’s very nice boy,” Tikki sniffed. “And he’s right—you would like him.”

“I’ll have you know I have a boyfriend, Traitor Tikki! I am not interested in other boys!” She pulled her phone out of her purse, hoping no one had been looking for her while she was transformed. “See, Adrien texted me! Oh, but I didn’t respond right away! I hope he’s not upset. Hmm, okay, it was only two minutes ago.”

He had sent a link to a YouTube video. The multipass scene from  _ The Fifth Element.  _ She knew it by heart, but since Adrien sent it, Marinette watched it anyway. ‘Yeah, anyway,’ Korben Dallas said to close out the clip, ‘we’re in love.’ _ _


	3. Chapter 3

“You have too many commitments.”

Marinette eyed her agenda. She was used to it being decorated with stickers depicting Adrien’s schedule: Chinese on Mondays, basketball on Wednesdays, fencing on Fridays. The stickers had been carefully picked off with her fingernails. The glossy magazine prints had come down, too. Sure, they’d talked before about how she was just into fashion, but… And yes, Gabriel Agreste was her literal hero, artistically speaking, but there were plenty of other Gabriel models out there. Now that Adrien was in a position to come over and see her room regularly, he was bound to notice that it was only him that she tore out of magazines and taped to her bedroom walls. Adrien knew she was a fan—they’d talked about it—but they’d also talked about how he was embarrassed by the attention. She needed to prove she wasn’t just some fangirl.

If he ever went up to the loft and looked closely at her corkboard, he would find that it was still overwhelmingly Adrien-centric. But those photos were all from outings their friends had gone on together. Alya and Nino and Luka and Kagami and Rose and Juleka and everyone was pinned there, too. He’d noticed from a distance all those different faces, maybe remember their different adventures, and not think too much about it. Her desktop wallpaper changed, too—no longer a collage of Adriens, but a photo of him hand in hand with Marinette that Alya had taken at school on Monday. 

Her room looked bare. Her giant pull down screen schedule looked bare. There were only a few yellow sticky notes cheerily flagging when she ought to work on various obligations to meet her different deadlines.

Adrien pointed an accusatory finger at Thursday. “You double-booked baby-sitting and button-making.”

“That’s because I can make buttons _ while _ I baby-sit.”

Brow knit, Adrien looked like he was trying to solve a puzzle. There was something ludicrous about his concentration—that _ Adrien, _ with his sports and private tutors and modeling, thought _ she _ had too many commitments. Marinette wasn’t half as busy as she intended to be once her online store went live. When she started selling hand-made clothing made to order, _ then _ he’d see busy. (Hopefully.)

“Did you schedule time to sleep?”

“I’ll catch up on sleep after the history test.”

“I’m pretty sure sleep doesn’t work that way.”

Tikki’s commentary regarding Marinette’s schedule had been largely the same. It was lucky the existence of kwamis was a secret. If Tikki and Adrien ever had the chance to team up, Marinette’s ambitions might not be strong enough to overcome two pairs of babydoll eyes. 

Further contemplation of her schedule failed to offer Adrien any insight into how to add more hours to a week. It wasn’t his fault. This was his first time seeing her agenda. Marinette, on the other hand, had arranged and rearranged those sticky notes half a dozen times already, finding the best possible way to evenly distribute tasks so that everything would be done on time and she wouldn’t get burnt out. Difficult tasks got an afternoon to themselves while easy or fast tasks were double-booked together. 

“What if,” Adrien suggested cautiously, his hand hovering over one of the Thursday sticky notes, “we made the buttons now?”

_ Well. _

Pros: Manon would have Marinette’s full attention on Thursday, which was really the manufacturer's recommended setting for Manon.

Cons: Marinette had purposefully left Tuesday afternoon blank because Mrs. Chamack booked Thursday baby-sitting ages ago, which meant that with Adrien’s MWF extracurriculars, Tuesday afternoon was the only time this week they could meet up outside of school. And sure, spending time together at school was great. It was nice to hold his hand in the courtyard between classes. Sometimes, during a lecture, she would lapse into staring at him, and Adrien would turn around and catch her. His smile in those moments was so beautiful and his eyes twinkled with happiness. He _ liked _ to catch her staring.

But.

She wanted more than hurrying through a conversation about how well they each understood the day’s physical science lesson in the five minutes they had before a literature round-table. And yes, giggling while they ducked into the locker room to steal a kiss or two with the illusion of privacy was exciting. But what she really wanted was what they had in that dark movie theater on Saturday. All that freedom. All that time. 

(Maybe she was being a little dramatic. It was only Tuesday, after all. They had not seen each other at all on Sunday—probably, Adrien was being punished for sneaking out, though he was too good to complain about it. And Monday at school. Today at school. It wasn’t like they had really been deprived, was it? It just _ felt _ like forever.)

With a hesitance that suggested he wished he had been able to come up with a better, more radical and life-changing solution, Adrien added, “Would that help?”

“Yeah.” Marinette peeled the button-making note off of Thursday and pressed it on to Tuesday. It drooped a bit. Some of the stickiness had worn off. “It would. If you don’t mind, I mean?”

Adrien put his hands in his pockets, the air of relaxed nonchalance impeccable. “It doesn’t matter to me what we do as long as we do it together.”

Marinette beamed. Really, he could not be more perfect if he tried. “You’re right!”

Oh, wait, no, he _ could _ be more perfect because his model-level composure melted away when she met his eyes. Blushing, Adrien cupped the back of his neck with one of his hands. “One question, though. How do we make buttons?”

Button-making had several steps, but nothing complicated. Plus, two people working together would have the job done in half the time it would have taken Marinette to do it alone. 

“We begin with the images!” Marinette gave the pull down screen a sharp tug, and up the agenda went, curling into the casing hanging from the ceiling with a satisfying _ thwph! _She dropped into the chair in front of her computer and clicked through to her Kitty Section designs. “Since these are to sell at Kitty Section’s gig on Saturday, I was thinking 100 logo buttons, and 25 each of Luka, Juleka, Rose and Ivan’s mask symbols.” 

Adrien leaned on the back of the chair, one hand bracing him. “How many people are they expecting?”

“That’s the tricky part—there’s no way to know. They were invited to play in the basement of Le Purple Distortion. Ivan told me it’s a music club in the Saint-Ambroise district and that playing in the basement is a big deal. Sort of like a right of passage for an up-and-coming band. People might come down to the basement to see a new act, but they might also stay upstairs where the more well-known bands play.” 

“If a new band playing in the basement is a big deal, then the people who go there know all about it. They’ll come down.” 

“Right, so we need to be prepared with promotional material when they do! We want the name Kitty Section to stick like glue in their minds.” This, Marinette demonstrated by pressing both pointer fingers to her temples. Brain adequately glued, she ticked off on her fingers, “I’ve made posters, fliers with their Bandcamp and SoundCloud info and a mass-text sign up sheet. All that’s left is the buttons!”

And with that, she hit print! 

“You did all that already?” Adrien sounded extremely impressed.

So impressed that she felt like she had misled him. “Oh, well, the fliers weren’t a big deal and the sign-up sheet is just gives you a number to text to get on the list.”

“No. If it wasn’t a big deal, they’d have done it themselves. They got Marinette to design everything, which shows how important it is that it looks great.”

“It’s not...well, I mean…I _ volunteered.” _

Marinette could see him in the reflection of her monitor screen. But she wouldn’t need to see him to know he was grinning. She could _ hear _ it. “I think the things you make are amazing. I could never have half as many ideas as you.”

It wasn’t even about _ ideas, _ not really. It was color and balance and emotion and inspiration and tweaking tweaking tweaking until it felt just right. The aesthetics of the Kitty Section costumes she designed were just one idea, really, bent this way and that for unity, cohesion and individuality to all co-exist. She would never deny that translating an internal intention into an object to be seen and consumed by others was work—often deeply frustrating work—but it was also simply the way her brain functioned. She couldn’t _ not _ do it. Marinette had heard a similar refrain to Adrien’s enough times to know lots of people didn’t think they way she did, but honestly, she couldn’t imagine their thought processes any better than they did hers. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

Reflection Adrien’s brow furrowed and he stood up a little straighter. “What do you mean?”

Marinette spun around in the chair. “You’re creative, too.”

He seemed confused. “Modeling?”

“Performance art is art_, _ Adrien.”

He considered that. “Photography is art. Design is art. Make-up is art. I don’t know that I’d call my part in it all art. I just do what I’m told.”

She had always been a big fan of his photo spreads. And that commercial! How did she live before _ Adrien: The Fragrance? _ But suddenly, her heart hiccuped and some internal voice she’d never heard before cried out that how Adrien felt about modeling was actually much more important than how much she enjoyed looking at pictures of him. “Do you like modeling?”

Adrien had always seemed as eager to do what he was good at as Marinette was to use her abilities. Everytime someone asked him to model or act in any number of creative projects, he had always behaved as though he wanted to do it. Was he just being nice? Had it really been a burden? His classmates and friends taking advantage? 

“Hm.” He shrugged. “I mostly like it.”

Marinette had been so far gone into her catastrophizing that a positive-to-neutral answer was genuinely shocking. “You don’t make it sound like much fun.”

Adrien reached across her to the printer and grabbed what was ready. “It’s not. It’s boring. So what do we do with these?”

“First we have to cut them out.” 

Adrien withered at the idea of cutting out what would amount to 200 small circles, but Marinette laughingly produced her die-cast cutting machine. She led him to the floor and set the machine before him. “Line it up, press, and now you have a perfectly cut out circle!” 

She set up the button-making machine next to him so that once he had cut out an image, she could put it straight into the button machine. It was more complicated of the two, but only in the sense that it took two presses of the lever to make a button: the first sealed the image under plastic and the second attacked the pin-back.

Adrien took to using the cutting machine with a careful precision it did not deserve, perfectly lining up the edges of the image with the circular blade. Marinette never devoted the time to ensuring everything was perfect when she made buttons alone, knowing that the edges were going to be folded under the backing anyway. As long as she had the images centered in the button-making machine, the cutting didn’t need so much dedication. But she appreciated how seriously he took doing his part, and there was something fascinating in watching Adrien do something with his hands.

He had beautiful hands. Much larger than her own, and with the long, slender fingers of a pianist. But his hands were also the hands of a fencer, and there were calluses. She couldn’t see them while he worked the die-cast cutting machine, but Marinette had held his hand enough—and was hyper aware of_ holding his hand!_—that she knew exactly where they were. Pad of his right thumb. Inside of his index finger, middle section. Base of his middle and ring fingers. And his hands were also the hands of a model, with his fingernails no doubt immaculately tailored to be ideally blunt. 

Adrien passed her a stack of images ready for the button machine and Marinette let her fingers linger on his. She wanted to feel those fingers cup the back of her head, brush her cheek, trace her lips… “You know,” she said, trying to shake out the fantasies and keep herself in the moment, “I’ve never seen you without your ring.”

Adrien froze. 

She laughed. “Isn’t that weird? Wearing it every day, sure, but you wear it when you model. Don’t designers usually want to pick accessories?”

“Father does, yeah,” Adrien said slowly, “but I told the photographer that my ring is my muse and I can’t model without it, so he lets me wear it.”

“Really?”

“Really it’s my muse or really I said that?”

“Really you say that and it works.”

“Every time.” He grinned and admitted in a low voice, “I have _ no idea _ what makes something a muse and I live in fear of follow-up questions.”

“Why not just take it off?”

Adrien pursed his lips in thought. Then he said, “Every time I try, I hear the voice of the friend who gave it to me screaming ‘Are you kidding me?’ and then I usually leave it on. I did take it off when we took those photos for your online store, though, so you have seen me without it.”

Marinette frowned. “I swear you were wearing it in those...I remember we got out the matching accessories, but in the photos I uploaded, you had your ring on.”

He tilted his head. “What pictures did you use?”

“The ones we did later, with Juleka.”

“Oh, well, that explains it. I put it back on after Juleka was akumatized. Nothing like everyone looking exactly the same to remind you to be true to yourself, right?”

“No kidding.” Being Lady Noire was a lot more fun than Ladybug, but trying to talk someone else through using a Lucky Charm and purifying akumas and amoks while knowing she couldn’t just take over and do it herself was just a brand new flavor of horrible stress. “I just feel bad now. I think we ask too much of you sometimes.”

“No, you don’t. I like being included, and I always have fun when I’m with you.”

Her entire face was probably beet red. Marinette fought the urge to look away and forced herself to meet his eyes. Adrien was looking at her with such fondness that if she wasn’t in danger of exploding before, she was now. Focus! “But you don’t like modeling.”

“I said I mostly like it.”

“You said it’s boring.”

“It is, but I still like it. Before I started modeling, I had a lot more free time, but everyone was still really protective. I wasn’t allowed to go out. Chloe was my only friend and we didn’t get to see each other that much. Our parents say they’re friends, but ever since her mom’s been back, I’ve been noticing that they don’t actually like each other. I mostly sat at home, watching movies by myself. Or watching anime by myself. Listening to music by myself. Playing video games by myself.” So much solitude that for a moment, he got lost in it. Even sitting on the floor of his girlfriend’s bedroom, Adrien struggled to find his way out.

“But then Father decided I should start modeling, and it was like this whole other world existed. There were _ people! _ And they were _ excited _ about something! Something I got to be part of! Modeling is boring, but photographers and make-up artists are all really passionate about what they do. I like, I don’t know, feeding off that? Experiencing it? Even if I don’t feel the same way.”

He had a point—being around people who were passionate about something made excitement contagious. Marinette had a lot more interests now than she did when she met Alya, simply because Alya was so unapologetically fascinated by everything that Marinette couldn’t help but follow. 

“And,” Adrien continued, “I think it’s taught me really useful skills that I didn’t have before. I have a thick skin, and I don’t embarrass easily, and I’m good at being what other people expect me to be.”

“Some of those are actually kind of awful.” 

“Maybe. But I think it’s important to respect that my fans like me and not punish them for it. If they’re more comfortable if I pretend to love the attention, then I’d rather do that.”

She wanted to throw her corkboard out the window. What penance could she perform for being complicit in making him feel like he had to pretend to be someone he wasn’t? 

“So don’t feel bad,” Adrien continued, “because like I said, I mostly like modeling and I always like doing things with you. Anytime you want, any design, I’m there.”

Marinette bit her lip. “Doesn’t it make you feel weird? I mean, I’m a fan of yours, you know, but also your friend and now we’re dating—I guess we’re dating, we don’t really go on dates, we mostly just hold hands—but…”

He grinned. “I don’t mind. It’s convenient.”

“Convenient?” she sputtered. “How is it convenient?”

“Because...well, you’re _ amazing. _ And I thought you’d never notice me. Which sounds silly, I guess, with all the billboards and everything, but I’ve been in love with you almost since the minute we met and I used to worry about how I’d ever get you to like some homeschooled doofus who barely knows how to have a conversation.”

She flushed. “You’re good at conversations.”

“Maybe. When they’re with _ you.” _

“I’m the one who’s bad at conversations! If they’re with you! I get so flustered.”

Adrien smiled and blinked slowly. “I like that. It’s cute.” 

Was steam coming off her head? Marinette felt like steam was coming off her head. “Do you want to break a take? We’ve made a lot of progress on the buttons, I feel like we should _ take _ a _ break.” _

“Sure. Anything you want to do before I have to go?”

_ Make out. _ “Um. No. Not really.”

“Okay.” Sitting cross-legged, Adrien looked around her room, scoping out potential activities. Marinette wasn’t sure what would catch his eye. Video games, maybe. She didn’t have a lot out that wasn’t sewing-related. Did he sew? Given his father, Adrien should at least know the basics. Finally, he just shrugged. Guess he didn’t see anything he liked after all. “Wanna make out?”

She said nothing, nodded in mute, red-faced shock, and Adrien pushed the die-cast machine and the button machine out of his way and scooted closer to her on his hands and knees and

how had someone so perfect ever feared she wouldn’t notice him?

* * *

Le Purple Distortion was _ crowded. _

Nearly everyone in Ms. Bustier’s homeroom had shown up to support Juleka, Rose and Ivan. Even Chloe and Sabrina had made an appearance, likely more out of the hope of being adjacent to someone famous than for their classmates, but still. The only one absent was Adrien. Unsurprisingly, his father felt that hanging around the basement of a music club best known for launching the careers of metal bands clashed with his image. Kids from other classes had come, too. Marinette noticed Marc with Nath and Alix, Aurore and Mireille each surrounded by a bubble of admirers, and Ada, Jean and tons of people she recognized by their faces but had never had the chance to learn their names. Luka was up near the stage, speaking with a cluster of boys his own age—friends from his school, no doubt, come to cheer him on. They all mixed with a crowd of strangers who were probably regular patrons of Le Purple Distortion and general metalheads. 

Marinette and Nino set up the merch table near the stairs that lead to the ground floor. It was accessible from the dance floor, both out of the way and impossible to miss. The buttons went fast. Just about everyone from school wanted one of the logo buttons and the Luka ones disappeared along with them.

Alya had positioned herself near the stage, camera ready to record the show. Clips from their performance would make a great addition to the Kitty Section website, and they could splice in interviews Alya would conduct afterwards.

Even before the show had begun, the club was hot and loud, metal affincinados humming with excitement for the upcoming act. It turned out the basement’s reputation for hosting new bands was highly regarded in the local music scene. People really had come out to see what Kitty Section was all about. The merch table was picked over by people Marinette had never seen before, the fliers disappeared and the number to text to join the mass text list kept their phones buzzing.

Marinette and Nino had Adrien in on video chat so that they could show him the venue and how well the merch table looked, but the basement was so loud that it was nearly impossible to include him in a conversation.

After what felt like a million years of rising anticipation, the notes of Kitty Section’s opening number rippled through the crowd. The people on the dance floor were jumping and waving their arms already. The lone straggler still lingering at the merch table was typing the mass text number into his phone when Rose pulled the microphone to her mouth and belted out a line about glitter.

The guy with the phone stopped typing. “What did she say?”

Nino leaned forward, elbows on the table. Rose began listing everything that could be improved by glitter. And it was everything. The name of the song was literally _ Everything Needs Glitter. _ “Kitty Section is a kawaiicore band, bro.”

“A what?”

“Kawaiicore. It’s a really cool genre. They blend heavy metal instrumentation with J-pop aesthetics and cute lyrics.” Nino picked up his phone. Adrien couldn’t be heard over Kitty Section, but he could hear them and had texted his input. “My dude Adrien advises you to check out _ Gimme Chocolate! _ by Babymetal or _ Nippon Manju _ by Ladybaby. They’re Japanese bands that pioneered kawaiicore.”

“Metal isn’t for babies!” Phone guy picked up a Rose pin and squeezed as if he thought he could crumple it like a sheet of paper.

On the stage, _ Everything Needs Glitter _ ended with a blood curdling cry for more glitter and Rose took a long swig of water as Luka, Juleka and Ivan transitioned into the lastest version of _ I Love Unicorns. _

Marinette’s patience for watching Nino try to educate their ersatz customer on music was long extinguished well before he launched into a predictable rant on how unicorns were not metal. “Kitty Section was invited to play here. Le Purple Distortion likes their sound _ and _ their lyrics! No one is obligated to play only music that _ you _ like.”

“Plus unicorns are hardcore,” Nino added.

“Unicorns aren’t metal! Metal is tough! Metal isn’t for babies! _ Or little girls who wuv unicowns!” _

“Music is for everyone, bro. If you don’t like their sound, that’s cool. Just don’t join the mailing list and let other people enjoy it.”

“Nobody panic!”

Marinette turned to the stage. The music came to a screeching halt as Chloe rushed the stage, shoved Rose aside and explained, “There is an akuma. Queen Bee is here. Take a few deep breaths, think happy thoughts and walk calmly to an exit. Please.”

A lot of people packed into a crowded space abruptly alerted to a threat could have only reaction: pandemonium.

“I said nobody panic!” Chloe screeched.

Nino launched himself out from behind the merch table, sliding his phone into his back pocket. “Not this way! There are more crowds upstairs. Use the emergency exit to the street, you’ll get out faster.”

Alya and Max propped open the emergency exit doors. Chloe, Alix and Kim started directing people to leave in an orderly fashion. Nino dashed upstairs to get started on evacuating the patrons upstairs. Marinette followed him, but ducked into an empty restroom.

Tikki poked her head out of Marinette’s bag. “Marinette, your phone’s ringing.”

“No time. Tikki, spots on!”

Ladybug was hardly surprised to discover that the butterfly’s target was the gatekeeping metal fan with such rage over a band singing lyrics he didn’t like. He’d become a hulking beast adorned by a flaming skull pin. The nerve of Hawk Moth! The akuma was in one of her own pins! “You sure throw a lot of tantrums for someone who doesn’t like Babymetal!”

“Metal! Isn’t! For! Babies!” He screamed with such force that Ladybug skidded back a few feet before landing flat on her back.

Okay. She knew where the akuma was. She knew his power was concussive screaming. Cat Noir hadn’t shown up yet, but she had all the information she needed to defeat this villain and purify the akuma.

And that was when the table hit her.

Only, it wasn’t the light plastic table with hollow metal legs it had been when she and Nino set it up. It was solid metal, far heavier than it had any right to be. Even at this weight, it ought to be no problem for her enhanced strength, but she’d been pinned to the ground with no leverage to lift it off. Ladybug could reach her yo-yo, but she didn’t have the range of motion to use it. Using Lucky Charm to free herself from a table wasn’t the best use of her power, but the beast was coming in fast for her earrings and it didn’t look like she had a choice.

“Cataclysm!”

The table pinning Ladybug to the floor collapsed into a pile of ashes. Cat Noir took her by the hand and hauled Ladybug to her feet.

“Perfect timing, kitty.”

He twirled his baton. “I heard our new playmate doesn’t like kitties.”

“He doesn’t like much of anything. Be careful—his scream is like a strong wind _ and _ can turn objects to metal.”

“Metal fan who turns things into metal. Not very creative.”

“Go for the button. That’s where the akuma is.”

Beneath his mask, Cat Noir’s eyebrows raised. “A flaming skull button? Didn’t think that was Marinette’s style.”

Ladybug glared. _ “Not the time!” _

“I’ll squash you like the bug you are!” Their foe charged. Cat Noir dramatically yawned. Ladybug dropped into a crouch to keep her center of gravity low as she braced for another scream. But the beast didn’t attempt to throw something else, he just ran towards them, as though intending melee combat. “Ladybugs aren’t metal! Yet!”

Cat Noir leapt in front of her.

A statue.

A metal statue.

_ That stupid cat! _

What was he _ thinking? _ She knew how to dodge! She had explicitly warned him of their opponent’s ability to transform things into metal!

Ladybug threw her yo-yo to the stage lights and swung up into the rafters. She had the high ground now. She could see Luka below, hiding behind one of the large speakers that had once filled the room with music. “Lucky Charm!”

A stuffed animal fell into her arms. Black button eyes, cheery ladybug-patterned felt body and a single, spiral tusk. “A narwhal plushie?”

With grim determination, Ladybug ripped the plushie open and tore out the stuffing. She snapped the tusk off and dropped it on the stage floor beside Luka, partially hidden behind the speaker like he was, but partially sticking out in plain view, looking for all the world like a unicorn horn.

Luka, without missing a beat, cried out, “You know I love unicorns!”

The monster charged towards the stage and Ladybug dropped onto his shoulders from above. She smothered the flaming pin with the narwhal’s felt skin, wrestled it off the beast and threw it to the ground where it shattered. The akuma fluttered out and Ladybug jumped off her foe, captured the nasty bug and purified it. She picked up the narwhal tusk and tossed it into the air. “Miraculous Ladybug!”

Her ladybugs engulfed Cat Noir, and he stumbled as they retreated, once again flesh and blood. “M’lady!”

“Is fine,” Ladybug answered, fists on her hips. “We won.” She turned to the akuma victim. “No act of creation is ever wasted. Just because some music isn’t to your taste doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.”

Cat Noir chimed in, “Art helps people understand the world around them. There are some people that can only connect with others through media.” 

“I’ll try to be more open-minded,” the victim mumbled.

“It’s okay to not like things,” Ladybug added. “Nothing will please everyone. Just remember that other people have the right to sing the songs they want.”

“I’m sorry, Ladybug and Cat Noir.”

The heroes Paris (and Luka) shared a celebratory fistbump, and dashed out the emergency exit.

“I know why I’m leaving,” Cat Noir said as he vaulted onto a rooftop, “but why are you? Those are your friends and your merch table down there.”

Ladybug swung up beside him. “And they can’t know that. You figured me out, that means other people can. I need to put more space between Marinette and Ladybug.”

He shrugged. “You’re harder to pin down than you think you are. But since I’ve got you, can I ask you something?”

Her stomach twisted uncomfortably and she wanted to say no. “Sure.”

“I heard this _ thing. _ About an _ umbrella. _ That true?”

Well. That would be what her stomach was trying to warn her about! Her friends were so invested in helping her get together with Adrien that naturally, once it happened, she gave them all the play-by-play of exactly what went down in that theater. (The conversation-based parts, anyway.) Who spread the story, and more importantly, who knew Cat Noir well enough to spread the story to _ him? _“Where did you hear that?”

“Doesn’t matter. I just want to know if it’s true. You could have told me you’re into umbrellas. Here I was, giving you roses when I should have been showering you with umbrellas!”

_ “It’s not about the umbrella!” _

He blinked. “Then what is it?”

Ladybug wanted to tear her hair out. “Why do you even want to know?”

“I’m just trying to understand.” His feet were restless, twisting on a bare rooftop like he was digging in the dirt. “Why you want _him_ and not _ me.” _

“Don’t do this to yourself, Cat Noir. Nothing is going to change if you know. I love Adrien. There’s not some magic key to make me change my mind in umbrellas.”

“Yeah.” He rolled his shoulders. “Got it. But what’s the deal with the umbrella, though?”

“You really want to know?” Ladybug asked flatly.

“Really-really.”

“Fine.” She sighed and sat down on the rooftop, feet dangling over the edge. “Adrien and I didn’t get off to a good start. He’s friends with Chloe and...I don’t need to tell you how I feel about Chloe.” Cat Noir sat down next to her. Ladybug continued, staring straight ahead over the dreamy cityscape of Paris. “I assumed he was just like her and I didn’t give him a chance. And then one day, when I’d been nothing but mean to him the whole time we’d known each other, he saw me standing in the doorway at school. It was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella. So he gave me is. He told me he’d been trying to stop Chloe from being mean to me, and gave me his umbrella. I was _ so mean to him, _ kitty, and he was nothing but generous to me. So yeah. It was the umbrella. But it wasn’t about _ umbrellas. _ It’s because he’s kind. And he’s selfless. And he’s giving. He came over the other day and saw how much stuff I had to do and immediately volunteered to help me make the Kitty Section buttons. And that’s the way he always is.”

Ladybug turned to see how her partner had taken the story. Not well. He had shifted his entire body away from her so that she couldn’t see his face at all. She reached out, but stopped before touching his shoulder. Her pity would only make it worse.

She heard him take a shaky breath. And then, full of pep, Cat Noir teased, “Bet it doesn’t hurt that he’s hot stuff, either.”

“Stop it. You’re about to transform back. Get outta here.”

Inflection properly rakish, he drawled. “Sure you don’t want to watch? Worth the admission fee.”

“Good-_bye, _Cat Noir!”

* * *

💕Adrien💖:   
_What happened?_  
_Are you okay?_  
_ Are you still there?_

Tikki told her to check her phone, and she hadn’t done it. Their video call with Adrien had been on Nino’s phone, and when the commotion started, Nino had put his phone in his pocket, effectively cutting Adrien off from what was going on. He’d texted Marinette—frantically, by the looks of it—and she hadn’t replied. She hadn’t told him she was okay. She went up to a rooftop with Cat Noir and loitered, wasting time to protect her identity. Totally unaware of the texts from Adrien.

_ I’m okay  
_ _ There was an akuma but LB and CN showed up. Everything’s fine _

“Are you okay, Marinette? You look intense.”

“I’m fine!” Since Nino didn’t seem to buy it (and to be fair, she wouldn’t have, either, had their positions been reversed), Marinette added, “I’m just texting Adrien.”

“Your name for him is so normal. Right before you two got together, he changed you to like..ant ghost or something. I know he’s not used to people, but you’d think he’d be better at emojis.”

_ What’s your contact name for me?  
_ _ Nino says it’s weird _

💕Adrien💖:   
_ Nino shouldn’t spy on other people’s phones  
_ _ Marinette _

Nino pouted. “I wasn’t spying!”

“You’re reading over my shoulder right now!”

“Heh. My bad!”

_ How can we punish him for his spying ways?_

Adrien was slow to respond.

💕Adrien💖:   
_ IDK I could try whining about how boring it is over here  
_ _ He’d lose interest _

Biting her lip, Marinette wrote something very bold:  
_Want me to come over?_

💕Adrien💖:   
_ Stay at the show _

The merch was sold out and Marinette knew the set list by heart. Two more songs, an encore, and they’d be done.  
_After the show_

💕Adrien💖:   
_I don’t want you to get in trouble with Father and everybody over here_  
_ I don’t care if I get in trouble anymore. I’m always in trouble over nothing. It doesn’t matter  
But I don’t want them mad at you_

Well, now she was committed.  
_ Sneak me in!  
You sneak out. You have to know how to sneak back in_

💕Adrien💖:   
_ And reveal my secrets?  
_ _ Never! _

She giggled.   
_Okay  
__We’ll tell them I need your help studying for the history test!_

💕Adrien💖:   
_They’re heartless_  
_ They’d turn away a poor student in danger of failing_  
_ Which you aren’t  
So you can guess how fast they’d turn you away_

Hmm. She’d have to try another tactic.  
_You sneak out and come to my place then_

💕Adrien💖:   
_I would, but I already snuck out once today_  
_ I can’t risk getting caught  
It’d be really bad if they knew how I did it_

She wondered how often he snuck out.  
_Where’d you go?_

💕Adrien💖:   
_ Somewhere purple _

Marinette gasped.   
_!!!!_  
_ I didn’t see you!_  
_ Why didn’t you tell us you came?_

💕Adrien💖:   
_I know you didn't_  
_ I used my superpower_  
_ I’m the Invisible Man_  
_ I thought you knew_


	4. Chapter 4

“Marinette, it’s time we took stock of our lives.”

“Agreed.”

“There’s been some seriously poor decision making, and I’m sorry for the role I’ve played in leading you down this path.”

Marinette nodded stiffly. “I forgive you. You couldn’t have known.” 

Alya put her hand on Marinette’s arm. “You truly are the best friend I could have asked for. I am honored we’re going down together.”

They flipped their notebooks shut in unison, reached for their school bags and began to pack up.

“Hey! Why are you packing already? Study group still has twenty minutes and we haven’t written the last verse yet!”

_ “We,” _ Alya said sharply, “are going to finish studying at Marinette’s. We haven’t been able to get anything done since you two decided to rewrite chapter 17 of the textbook as a musical!”

Far from being contrite, Nino replied, “It’s a  _ hip hop opera.” _

Studying for the upcoming history test as a group had seemed like a great idea when they had it. Marinette and Alya studied together often enough to know their preferred methods worked great together. Marinette’s technique was as classic as it was effective: read the questions at the end of the chapter first, and then review the chapter as many times as it took to know every answer. Ms. Bustier sent home study guides and they were almost always lifted verbatim from the textbook, so she knew her teacher and the book agreed on what was important. Alya tended to remember things she wrote. While Marinette read, Alya would take notes. By quizzing each other, they’d inevitably end up discussing the finer points of the material and commit their fresh understanding to memory. 

Including Adrien in a study session was brilliant. No doubt due to his father’s exacting standards, Adrien consistently had the highest grades in their class. He didn’t fall prey to best and worst subjects. The pressure to excel never stressed him out and resulted in a low score. He was even immune to just having an off day and doing uncharacteristically poorly because he was sick or distracted. 

Of all the corners of her life, academics had taken the worst hit when Marinette became Ladybug. If she wasn’t late to class, she was exhausted, or distracted, or just plain absent because Hawk Moth seemed to figure that if he couldn’t defeat his teenage adversaries, he could at least ruin their educations and send out akumas during school. She still got good grades. Hawk Moth didn’t get to win. Not her earrings, and not on her report card—but it was a lot harder than it used to be. If Adrien knew the secret to perfect grades, she wanted it.

His secret, for history, anyway, was mnemonic devices. (He had different methods for each subject: “In science, you have to learn by doing, so pay the most attention during labs” and “math is easy, just practice the steps” or “authors want you to notice what’s important, so in literature, look for the patterns.”) For every paragraph in the history chapter they were studying, Adrien would write a verse, the catchier the better. Who, what, when, where, why it was important. (“Ideally, it should rhyme, but I’m not very good at coming up with rhymes.”)

It was fun, searching for synonyms and changing the sentence structure bit by bit to express the information they needed to convey with rhythm and rhyme. But it wasn’t a great study method for Marinette—she was spending a lot more time counting the syllables in a word she wanted to use than memorizing the answers to the chapter review questions—or Alya, who got so caught up in writing and rewriting one verse until the flow was impeccable that it was the only thing she’d written at all.

_ And then _ Nino started beatboxing, Adrien started singing, and from all around them people raised their phones to record fashion model, voice actor, award-winning fencer, pianist and, apparently,  _ singer _ Adrien Agreste debut a song they’d inadvertently written right here in the school library about Jacques Chirac’s first term as Prime Minister of France.

Marinette felt absurdly under-qualified to be the person sitting next to him. 

After all this time, she thought she knew him, but his well of talent went so deep that he was still able to surprise her and introduce skills she never would have guessed he possessed. And then because he was not just immeasurably gifted, but humble, too, he had laughed awkwardly and apologized for failing to respect the rule of relative silence in a library when it was over. And next to him sat Marinette. Silently flushed with adoration. Who was she? Nothing but the clumsy owner of a sewing machine who had done nothing to deserve him.

Alya was irritated about the whole thing.

And yes, Marinette had tried to conceal some parts of herself when she and Adrien started going out. But it wasn’t like she was  _ ashamed _ of stuffing forty-five photographs of him beneath her mattress. It didn’t make her a bad person. She just assumed he’d be more comfortable if that wasn’t a part of their love story. 

Alya and Nino had a relationship with strength, with  _ history.  _ He was practically a member of her family. Alya’s parents almost certainly saw more of him than his own. They knew everything about each other, even Rena Rouge and Carapace. And if Alya were to be believed, she had figured Carapace out well before Heroes’ Day had pushed Ladybug into making the reveal. Their comfort with each other was established. Alya was well beyond hiding it when Nino annoyed her. The very idea that something could come between them was an inside joke.

Marinette pictured Kagami. Praising Adrien’s lack of hesitance in performing publicly. Admiring his confidence in the material he had written. Focusing on his complete acceptance of the study methods that worked for him and helped him achieve unparalleled success. Was thinking she was equals with Adrien Agreste simply the latest in a series of Marinette Dupain-Cheng making a complete fool of herself?

It was easier to take refuge in Ayla’s annoyance. School bag packed, hands fisted on her hips, Alya wondered aloud, “Why do we love these dorks?”

What did Adrien even see in Marinette? What accolades had she earned? That she once won a contest by making a hat he was allergic to? “I don’t know.”

“Girls, wait!” Nino cried. “Are either of you sopranos? We need to cast Bernadette.”

“Marinette, remind me: Does someone by the name of Bernadette appear in chapter 17 of our history book? I don’t recall. I must  _ need to study it.” _

Marinette shrugged.

“Thought so. Bye, boys!”

Adrien began hastily packing his own bag. “Rain check on Bernadette, Nino. I’m gonna head out with Marinette.”

Alya nudged Marinette on the arm. With a sly smile and slyer eyes, she murmured, “If  _ he’s _ going with you, I’ll make myself scarce.”

Heat crept up Marinette’s cheeks. What was she supposed to say to Adrien without Alya’s security to emulate? Did everyone think she was just going to pretend that she and Adrien weren’t operating at vastly different levels of ability. Or worse, did they think  _ she _ didn’t know?

Adrien followed her out of the library and down the steps to the courtyard. Marinette fiddled with the strap of her purse. Was this the first time they’d walked together without holding hands since  _ Adèle?  _ She thought it might be. Was this the beginning of the end? Had Adrien decided to come with her so that he could tell her privately that he’d given things more thought and realized they were better off as friends?

“Sorry things got out of hand back there.”

“Oh! It’s okay! It’s fine!” Marinette forced herself to smile. There was no sense in making him feel bad about it. “No worries!”

“Nino and I usually don’t study together.” He smiled, too, small and cautious. Nothing happy. “Guess you can tell why.”

She looked down. “You were having a lot of fun.”

“We were, but I don’t know that that’s going to help us out on the test.”

“You’ll do great on the test. You always do.”

“I know what works for one person doesn’t work for everyone. Let’s study your way. You always do great, too.”

They ran out of stairs. It was down to them and the door now. “You only have twenty minutes before your bodyguard comes to pick you up.” Even in her own ears, the words sounded lifeless. Hopeless. What was she even doing? Would avoiding his company make it impossible for him to dump with her? Or, what if she proved she prioritized his convenience and comfort—would that change his mind? “We’d have to walk to my house, go upstairs, unpack all our stuff. By the time that’s done, there’s not even enough time left to bother getting started.”

_ “Oh.”  _

If they walked slowly, or if her mother stopped to ask about their day, or if her father had a new recipe in need of taste-testers, they would still have fifteen minutes. She knew that. He must know that. Fifteen minutes was enough time for chapter questions.

“If…” Adrien fidgeted. “If you don’t  _ want _ me to come over, then I’ll call home and say I finished early. That’d work. I have Chinese soon anyway.”

Marinette was in the grip of a disaster.

But it was not the disaster she thought.

She breathed deep. Exhale. Invented catastrophes loved to blow up into a full-scale onslaught. They wanted to make it impossible to see the real problems. They wanted to  _ cause _ the real ones. They wanted to leave her floundering in the aftermath, wondering how it all went so wrong and why she’d been unable to correct it. Yes, she and Adrien were different people. And yes, the sad truth was this relationship probably did have an expiration date. But it was not today, and even if it were, it would not be because Adrien had decided he was done. It would be because she got stuck in her own head and pushed him away.

Sorry, catastrophe. Not today.

“You can still come over,” Marinette said, angling her entire body towards him. She reached out with both hands, taking hold of his arm. Her fingers curled around his bicep and she felt the tension in his muscles slowly ebb. Her other hand lay against the crook of his elbow. “We’ll just do something else!”

They walked slowly. (Three minutes.)

When they arrived at the bakery, Marinette’s mother stopped to ask about school. Marinette hurried through her answers, “It was great! Real busy! Gotta go!” and Adrien carefully considered each class and gave an unreasonably detailed answer. It was almost enough to suppose he thought ‘How was your day?’ was a genuine question and not something people repeated daily out of rote politeness. (Two minutes.) In the back, Marinette’s father was experimenting with a new recipe for dark chocolate and candied orange peel tart—opinions? (Six minutes.)

Dishonest though it had been, Marinette’s initial prediction was correct: they didn’t have the time to take out their books and resume studying. From his bag, Adrien retrieved only his phone and wordlessly typed something, no doubt updating his bodyguard regarding his current location. Marinette tossed her own school bag on her desk. She gently laid her purse down next to it and carefully blocked Adrien’s view of it with her body as she slid a freshly pilfered macaron to Tikki.

After exchanging wordless smiles with her kwami, Marinette turned to see Adrien had taken to again examining her agenda. She should have rolled that screen up before she left for school this morning! Since last he saw it,  Mylène had approached the girls about petitioning Mr. Damocles to let her start a vegetable garden on campus. A  _ number _ of sticky notes had been added for the various stages of convincing the administration to let them do it, planning the project in earnest, and the on-going work of actually maintaining a garden. It was accompanied by a flowchart listing counterarguments to any objections Mr. Damocles might raise. Not that he ought to object to a  _ garden _ , but. Better to be prepared.

Adrien pursed his lips. “I have a question.”

“Sure.” She hoped it wasn’t the sleep question again.

“Valentine’s Day last year. Did you answer my poem?”

The question was so far removed from anything she thought he might find on that agenda that she sputtered. “What? Why are you asking that now?”

“Your handwriting.” He shrugged. “It’s really familiar.”

If he learned her handwriting from the poem, then he must have liked it, right? “I did. Yes. Did I forget to sign it?”

Excessively pleased, Adrien put that question to rest once and for all: “I hoped it was you!”

“And you don’t…” Well, there was no good way of couching this one, was there? “...think it’s  _ weird _ that I took yours out of the trash?”

Without missing a beat, Adrien replied, “I wrote it for you.”

“Yeah, but...you didn’t actually  _ give _ it to me. It’d be one thing to answer a poem that you meant to give me…” Her legs twisted with discomfort.

“I just decided I’d rather say it to your face.”

Marinette bit her lips. Be cool. Be cool be cool be cool. “Well, in that case, you’re just a  _ teensy _ bit behind schedule.”

Arms splayed wide, Adrien gestured to her agenda. “I didn’t know about the schedule! It should have been on a sticky note!” 

Laughingly, Marinette reached for a pen and her pad of notes. “Okay. What should it say?”

His eyes scrunched up and he tapped two fingers against his chin as he thought. “‘Adrien Confesses...’ Undying? No, eternal. Yeah. ‘Adrien Confesses His Eternal Love.’ And add in parenthesis ‘Not With Poetry.’”

“Eternity.” Marinette pronounced as she wrote. She hoped she got the punctuation right—he just  _ sounded _ like every word was supposed to be capitalized. “Sounds like a long time.”

He turned white, then red. “Please, please don’t make me explain anything I said at the wax museum. Or after. I can’t. I was being an idiot.”

“You aren’t an idiot.” And remembering what Alya said in the library… “ _ Or _ a dork.”

“I am sometimes! I was then, definitely. I was stupid and blind and I thought I knew what I was saying, but I didn’t.”

Adrien didn’t need to defend himself. Alya had already come up with an explanation that appeared more accurate by the second.  _ ‘He was just tongue-tied,’ _ she’d said.  _ ‘ _ _ And how many silly things that were not remotely what you meant have  _ you _ said to  _ him _ ?’  _ And what about his confession the other day? _ ‘ _ _ I’ve been in love with you almost since the minute we met and I used to worry about how I’d ever get you to like some homeschooled doofus who barely knows how to have a conversation.’  _ They had both been struggling to make their feelings heard.

“Don’t say things like that about yourself. You’re the most wonderful boy I’ve ever met.”

His brow furrowed. “Marinette. What if I’m not who you think I am?”

A corny little  _ be yourself _ platitude ran through her head. But he looked so earnest. Adrien always did—ironic, maybe, that a model expected to wear whatever expression the photographer wanted was so open and expressive. She couldn’t doubt that this question was genuinely haunting him. But why would it? How could he fear he had misled anyone? 

Well, she knew he was held to high standards by his august father. Marinette was impressed by all Adrien had accomplished, knew he had talents buried that she didn’t even know about yet. Maybe he feared failing to live up to expectations. Maybe he thought she, too, had a checklist of deeds he was expected to perform flawlessly and anxiety over the possibility of coming up short. “So just be  _ Adrien. _ I’m not looking for anyone else.” 

The world shuddered into slow motion as Adrien raised his right hand to her face and gently brushed her cheek with the back of his fingers. He was so close and his eyes were so  _ intent _ and had she ever appreciated them enough before? Looking at them now she could  _ feel _ the blood surging through her body. Her heart was pounding so hard its echoes made her lips throb. Adrien’s eyes were so beautifully,  _ overwhelmingly _ green.

(Who knew eyes could be that green?)

Her toes, quite with a mind of their own, inched closer and closer. Her arms wound around his shoulders. Was she pulling him down to her or keeping her balance by clinging to him? She didn’t know. But she felt him tremble when she pressed her lips to his.

The disobliging world intruded, not loud or angry, but gently. A tap on the trapdoor. Her mother’s kind voice. “Adrien, your ride is here.”

From under his breath came something that may have been a whimper but may also have been an incredulous mutter of, “Now?” 

Another knock, more insistent now. “Adrien?”

“Guess it’s too late to pretend I’m not here,” he sighed. “Bye, Marinette. Thanks for having me over.” He collected his things, and regretfully, she saw him out.

* * *

“Undignified taste?” Marinette laughed and unfolded herself from the deck chair. “What does that even mean?”

“The film he considers representative of French cinema comes to mind.”

Marinette crossed the balcony to the railing and leaned against it. Her history book lay forgotten on the tea table behind her. “Are you talking about  _ The Fifth Element?” _

“Yes. He has had me watch it two more times with the belief that further analysis will lead me to share his views, but I confess I not only question the artistic merit of the film but Adrien’s conception of artistic merit itself.”

“You have to admit the Diva Dance opera scene alone is an incredible artistic achievement.”

“That’s what he said. I feel no impetus to concede.”

“What movies do you—wait.” Marinette frowned. She had become accustomed to a certain auditory landscape on the rooftop patio. Specifically, one where the sounds of the city rose up from below. Up here, nothing came from above or behind. “Let me call you back. There’s a stray cat on the roof.”

Perched on the sloping wall between her awning and the chimney crouched Cat Noir. “Whoops.”

“They’re a nuisance alright. Bye, Kagami.” Marinette ended the call with a swipe of her thumb. 

With all the sure-footedness of a cat, he leapt down lightly (hands first) and landed between two potted plants. “I’m not a stray. I’m wearing a bell, I’ve been collared.” Cat Noir wove through the pots, somersaulted over the edge of the half-wall and landed on the railing. 

In retrospect, Marinette was surprised his knowledge of Ladybug’s identity had not led him here more often. “Slow day?”

“Eh. I had hopes for tonight, but they didn’t really work out.”

“You’ve got time. It’s still pretty early.” Early enough that Kagami’s mother falling asleep long enough to give her daughter time to call a friend on the telephone was still firmly in nap territory. The sun was thinking about setting, but had yet to commit.

“Good evening, Cat Noir!” Tikki emerged from the rose box.

“Hi, Tikki!” He grinned. “You know, I don’t say that enough. Hi, Tikki.”

“Well,” Tikki answered, “I  _ am _ a secret.”

“That must be lonely,” Cat Noir observed.

“It’s not! I have Marinette!” Tikki floated to Marinette’s side and nuzzled her cheek.

Cat Noir folded his arms across his chest and nodded with eyes closed, the very picture of serious, thoughtful agreement. Marinette rolled her eyes. “Who could be lonely when they’re with Marinette?”

Marinette slid her phone into her back pocket and scooped up her history text. “Cat Noir, if you’re going to stick around, can we take this inside? I really don’t want to draw attention to superheroes on my balcony.”

“Oh. Sure. Sorry.” He followed her down the trap door. “Although...I do distinctly remember you—Marinette you—telling me—Cat Noir me—that we could be friends. So how bad can superheroes on your balcony be?”

“That’s different. That whole thing was me trying to throw you off my trail—I thought for sure you were going to guess I was Ladybug. But you didn’t. Then. Did you?”

He shook his head. “Nope. But if I did think you were Ladybug then, saying you’re in love with me wouldn’t have thrown me off your trail. I wouldn’t have been all,” (and here he clapped his palms against his cheek in a facsimile of dramatic realization) “‘Marinette can’t be Ladybug, she says she loves me and Ladybug would never say that!’ I’d have been like,” (with fists raised in triumph) “‘Yes! Finally!’”

Actually, asking him to come inside had probably been a bad idea. She should have transformed and chased him from rooftop to rooftop. If she’d done that, then she wouldn’t be wondering if she ought to remind him that she had a boyfriend now. He couldn’t have forgotten already! But then, he was an optimist. Maybe he thought that if he just ignored her relationship and continued making reference to his own feelings, Adrien would just go away.

Thankfully, her room disabused him of that notion for her. Cat Noir knelt on her bed, staring trance-like at the corkboard. The Featuring Everyone, but Starring Adrien corkboard. “My friends,” Marinette explained, though he had not asked. “But I guess you knew that.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you have a favorite.”

“Maybe you don't know as much as you think.” She strode down the steps.

Cat Noir slid down the banister. “How are things going with...you know... _ the boyfriend? _ Is it everything you hoped it would be and more?” 

The question was unsettling. Her fantasies before tended to jump from love confession to marriage, home and family. Expectations regarding dating him had been hazy to non-existent. She had just wanted him to  _ like _ her. And he did. According to the sticky note on her agenda, he loved her eternally. “He’s perfect.”

But Cat Noir wasn’t asking after Adrien, not really. He was asking after  _ her, _ and that answer did not satisfy him. “Are you happy? You can tell me if you’re not.” 

Marinette’s first instinct would be to call this wishful thinking on his part. Assume he was simply hoping for a chance to be with her himself when this whole Adrien thing had run its course. But he wasn’t cavalier or hopeful or even flirtatious. He was so goofy and over the top that it was usually hard to figure out when he was being sincere, but this was absolutely genuine worry. “Why do you think I’m not happy?”

He looked away and shrugged. “No reason. Not like anything weird happened today.”

“You were in the library.”

“Wha-a-a-a-a-at?” His voice broke, and his tail went all zig-zag, like an electrocuted cartoon character.

“At the library. I had an anxiety attack when Adrien and Nino were doing that song.  _ That’s _ why you think I’m unhappy with him.”

Cat Noir took a deep breath. “Where are you on...do you want me to verify my whereabouts or say no comment?” 

Marinette paced. She should have known she couldn’t maintain complete ignorance forever. Whoever Cat Noir really was, he was part of her life. She knew that. He was in her life enough to realize she was Ladybug simply by interacting with both of her personas. And they had at least one close mutual friend in common. He knew the umbrella story. He had heard it from  _ someone _ . Someone who knew he was invested in Marinette well enough to repeat it. Master Fu told her that he had found them very close to each other, that he knew they had met. He had found her at the crosswalk between her home and the school. Cat Noir must have been found at school, too.

“You were there.”

Cat Noir held up one finger. “Jacques Chirac has a very musical name and I’m not the only one who thinks so.” He raised his next finger. “Hip hop opera,  _ hipopera, _ we were all thinking it, I alone am brave enough to say it.”

She burst out laughing.

Cat Noir blinked, then nodded. “I am hilarious. My word play is on point.”

“It’s not that! It’s...you being  _ you.” _

With breathless eagerness, he cried, “You see me? You saw me there, you  _ know _ me?”

“No! I mean, yes, I think  _ something _ . But that’s not what I meant. Whenever I—Ladybug me, I mean—when I feel like I’m in over my head, it’s  _ you _ that pulls me out and keeps me grounded.  _ Of course _ you came over because you caught Marinette me catastrophizing.”

Cat Noir deflated. “I didn’t actually know that’s what it was.”

“You knew enough to come here.”

“Yeah…” He puffed up his cheeks and let out a slow breath. “The happiness thing, though, that still matters. I’m always happy when I’m with you. Even when things are hard, I still…I’d still rather be by your side than anyone else in the world. You should feel that way, too. About somebody.”

Cat Noir didn’t get as far as ‘even if they aren’t me’ but Marinette could tell that general sentiment was where he was headed. “I do, kitty.” It was hard to put her feelings for Adrien into words other than tried and true love, but what Cat Noir described fit pretty well. Any day, any circumstance, she’d rather be with Adrien than anyone in the world. “And you deserve someone who feels that way about you.”

A sly smile crept across his lips. “I have my eye on someone, Bugaboo.”

Even without Miraculous-enhanced agility, somethings were reflexes. “Don’t call me ‘Bugaboo!’”

“But it’s so cute!” Laughing, Cat Noir bound up the steps to the loft on all fours, raised himself to his standing height when he reached the top and twirled around to blow her a kiss. The grin never left his face, even as Marinette pantomimed wiping it off. Reaching up to grasp the edge of the skylight to propel himself out into the rapidly fading daylight, Cat Noir paused. “By the way—what happened to all the magazine pics?”

Marinette wrinkled her nose. “None of your business!”

“Models are so vain.” Cat Noir wagged his eyebrows. “He was probably into all that." With that, her partner disappeared.

Marinette collapsed into her desk chair. “Tikki, what are we going to do with that cat?”

A rhetorical question, but Tikki considered it carefully nonetheless. “Optimism isn’t a bad quality, Marinette.”

With one finger, Marinette tickled Tikki’s belly. “Maybe I just need to talk to someone who isn’t shipping me with another boy when she knows I have a boyfriend!” Marinette rose off the chair just enough to slide her phone out of her pocket. Kagami was still at the top of her recents. “Hi again,” she said when Kagami answered. “Can you still talk? Great! So, if Adrien’s taste is undignified, what movies do you like?”

No hesitation. That was Kagami’s style, wasn’t it? “Studio Ghibli.”

“Oh! They did  _ Arrietty! _ I love that one!”

* * *

Tuesday morning, Adrien’s phone laid innocently face down on his table. When Ms. Bustier came in, it was going to have to go in his bag, but now it just taunted her.

Marinette leaned forward on her elbows. “Adrien,” she sang, “show me your weird contact name for me?”

He had been facing her and half-turned to peer at his phone from the corner of his eye. “It’s not weird. It’s a rebus. And I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She laughed. “Okay, okay. But, hypothetically, why would I be a rebus in your phone and what is a rebus?”

“You’ve seen them. They’re those puzzles that use pictures to represent words. And, hypothetically, because it’s my phone and  _ I  _ think it’s cute.” His phone, as if it knew it had been invoked, began to buzz. Adrien jumped, snatched it up and made a mad dash out of the classroom.

Alya whistled. “What was _ that?” _

Nino looked briefly to the hall where they could see Adrien on the phone through the classroom window, then back to the girls. “You remember that audition he had? The Isa and Asimov video?”

“Sure,” Alya said trading glances with Marinette. “It was two weeks ago, not even.”

“He didn’t get the callback. He should have heard something last week and he didn’t.”

“Oh.” Why hadn’t he said anything? The very first job he went tried to get for himself, without his father’s connections to back him up, and he hadn’t made it passed the first round. Worse, they hadn’t even valued him enough to tell him they weren’t interested. “Do you think I should talk to him about it?” Marinette asked.

“I wouldn’t,” Nino advised. “He might be trying to forget the whole thing ever happened. If he doesn’t bring it up, just let it go.”

“If he’s that intense about a phone call, I don’t think he’s forgotten about it,” Alya observed.

“Look, Adrien’s…” Nino snapped his fingers. “Adrien’s like a cat. If he’s hurt, he hides it. He doesn’t want you to know how bad it is. Listen to the way he talks and you’d think his dad is a little distant, no big deal. Truth is, Adrien hardly ever  _ sees _ him. And have you  _ ever _ heard him talk about his mom being missing? If something’s bad, he just won’t go there. Adrien hasn’t mentioned the video, but I know he’s bummed. Just don’t tease him so much.”

Alya scoffed. “We  _ barely _ tease him.”

Ms. Bustier’s entrance put an end to their conversation, but Adrien remained on the phone in the hall. He crept in about ten minutes into the lecture. “That’s a tardy, Adrien.”

“Sorry, Ms. Bustier.” But he was smiling.

And when Ms. Bustier asked the class to think-pair-share, Adrien turned around and completely disregarded the short story they were supposed to be discussing. “That was my agent. I got the callback!”

“What?” Marinette squealed. Lowering her volume to something more think-pair-share appropriate, she said, “I mean, what? That’s amazing? Why did it take so long?”

“The casting director didn’t like me. He said I’m too young and the optics would be bad. But Isabelle Ire saw my tape and she wanted me to come in for round two anyway. Apparently, the band and the director have been fighting for creative control of the video for ages and she just won.”

“Awesome!”

“Congrats, dude!”

“Marinette, come with me! Please?”

“When is it?” The first round audition had been on a Thursday morning, something that made more sense now that she knew they had been looking to cast someone older. “If it’s during school, my parents probably won’t let me go.”

“Thursday.” Adrien pressed his palms together in a pleading prayer. “I need you to come! And my tutor will be there, too. We’ll be studying the whole time. You won’t miss anything, I promise.”

Her parents might find it in their hearts to say no, but Marinette couldn’t. “I’ll ask.”


	5. Chapter 5

Adrien had never made it a secret that despite the glamor attached to his profession, it was mostly boring.

Even with his warnings, Marinette was surprised by just how much of the audition process was _ waiting. _They waited in the car for permission to park. When they were admitted into the studio, they waited in the reception area while files were updated and someone unseen rang Adrien’s agent to argue with her about some minor point of something-or-another. Then, they were asked to move to a smaller, more specialized room for yet more waiting.

Still, Marinette was grateful her parents had let her come. Her father especially was always ready to make whatever sacrifice was necessary to support her ambitions, but Marinette had doubted they would smile upon her skipping school to join her fashion model boyfriend in pursuing his. And they had said no. 

At first.

Until they learned that Adrien’s supposed tutor was actually field teacher employed by Françoise Dupont High School. Field teachers were most commonly associated with kids whose chronic illnesses or disabilities meant they were physically unable to attend school, but it turned out they also oversaw the education of kids in Adrien’s position. He wasn’t the first teen celebrity to attend Françoise Dupont and he wouldn’t be the last. There was a system in place to ensure the job did not interfere with busy students’ ability to stay in step with their classes.

In retrospect, it was blindly obvious his perfect grades stemmed not from his study methods but from all the one-on-one instruction he received.

And, well, Marinette _ had _ been struggling academically lately. Her parents found saying no to skipping school easy. Resisting tutoring precisely aligned to her teachers’ syllabuses was harder. 

Ms. Soutien challenged them with math problems in the reception area, encouraged them to forget the rest of the hopeful dancers by leading literature analysis in the waiting room. Marinette’s mastery of the ramifications of Jacques Chirac’s first term as Prime Minister was beginning to rival Adrien’s when the door finally opened up and they were told not that it was his turn, as they’d been hoping, but that the band was breaking for lunch, and auditions would resume in an hour.

“It must be pretty intense in there,” Adrien observed. He’d been inattentive all morning, far more interested in jostling something in his jeans pocket than engaging with the material Ms. Soutien presented. “Last time, we were done by now.”

“I think a break is exactly what we all need,” Ms. Soutien said, shutting her own history text. “How about you two get some lunch, and we’ll pick this up in an hour, Marinette?”

“Sounds great!” Marinette grinned at Adrien. He returned a weak smile. “You just wait until you’re done with your audition! I’ll be wowwing you with my knowledge of history when it’s over!”

“Thanks for coming with me, Marinette.”

“Oh...well…” Cheeks warm, she focused on packing her school bag. “I’m not really _ doing _ anything. Just keeping you company and stealing your tutor. You’re the one who’s auditioning for something and that’s really amazing and I know you’ll do a great job.” 

Adrien slung his bag over his shoulder. “I hope so. Honestly, it’s all really nerve-racking. I couldn’t do this without you.”

How was he so humble? “Of course you could. You do this sort of thing every day.”

“I’ve _ never _ done this part before. It’s a lot scarier than I thought it would be. I keep thinking, ‘what if they don’t pick me?’ or ‘what if they _ do _ pick me, and it ends up being bad for my brand?’ With you here, I know everything’s going to be okay. I could take on the whole world if you were with me.” 

Marinette let Adrien pull her out of her chair and to her feet. She squeezed his hand. “You don’t need me for that. You can already take on the world. Isabelle Ire loved your first audition. They’re going to pick you.”

“Maybe.” Despite the pep talk, he was still restless. “But they might be right about the optics being bad if they cast someone our age. Isa and Asimov videos are usually pretty creepy.”

He had a point. While Marinette liked their music just fine—not a personal favorite, but they were okay—she did tend to avoid watching Isa and Asimov’s music videos. ‘Pretty creepy’ didn’t begin to describe some of the imaginary they’d put together. And even if it was just corn syrup and food coloring, or whatever special effects wizards actually used, Marinette didn’t like the idea of Adrien being bloodied in a gory music video. “Your dad wouldn’t have let you audition if he thought it would be bad for your image.” 

They meandered out of the waiting room. The halls of the studio building stretched out before them, all closed doors and framed posters. “You’re right about that. Honestly, I was really surprised he let me. I thought for sure he’d say no, but he said it was good that I was finally taking initiative. I guess I _ am _ usually pretty bad about that.”

From the waiting room, they turned left, which felt right at the time, but none of the posters lining the walls looked familiar. Marinette couldn’t tell if it was because there were so many of them that they all blended together after a while or because she really hadn’t seen these particular ones on the way in. “You have plenty of initiative! Like going to school! That was _ your _ idea.” 

“Yeah, but that wasn’t initiative. Chlo gets to go to school. I just wanted to be _ normal. _Father says wants me to take more responsibility, but he doesn’t let me make any choices about what projects I’m involved in at Gabriel. He just wants me to do what I’m told. How am I supposed to do both?”

Marinette bit her lip. That was tricky. It sounded like Adrien was being pulled in two different directions at once, but she was confident he could manage to figure it out. In fact, he may have already done so. “Going out for jobs on your own is how. It’s the best of both worlds. You get to pick jobs and get them by being you, and your father keeps creative control over how his designs are modeled.”

“You’re right. That probably is what he meant.” One antsy hand stayed in his pocket, still fiddling with whatever it held.

“What _ is _ that?”

Sheepishly, Adrien pulled out the lucky charm she’d given him. “Stacking the odds in my favor. I’ve got my Marinette lucky charm, and my charming, lucky Marinette.” 

Given how often she felt the tell-tale tingles of blood rushing to her face when he was around, she hoped Adrien liked making her blush. “I’m not lucky, I’m a disaster. I’m so clumsy, I destroy anything I touch!”

He laughed. Anyone else, and she would have been mortified, but Adrien’s laughter never felt like it was at her expense no matter how big of a klutz she was. When he laughed, it was pure joy. When he laughed, she felt in on the joke. A part of his happiness. “I’m sorry,” Adrien said, swallowing any errant chuckles that still wanted to escape. “It’s not you.” The hand that had been holding hers dropped it, and he wound his arms around her shoulders. “Sorry.”

Quickly vanishing lunch hour and labyrinth-like studio aside, Marinette was in no hurry to break out of Adrien’s embrace. For his part, he seemed content to stand with his arms looped around her shoulders and his nose in her hair. He was right—they could do anything if they were together. They could make a billion pin-back buttons, ace every test, coolly get through the boring-yet-anxiety inducing audition process and, most immediately relevant, find their way out of this building. There would be plenty of time for cuddles when everything on the agenda was complete.

“Let’s go back the way we came and see if we can get our bearings back.” 

Adrien slowly released her. “Good idea.” 

“None of you get it!” 

Marinette and Adrien traded uneasy glances. While it was nice to know they were not alone in the endless studio, whoever was nearby was having some kind of argument. The woman shouting had an eerily familiar voice. Quietly, Marinette asked, “Is that Isabelle Ire?” Had they stumbled upon the band itself?

“Maybe,” Adrien whispered. “I didn’t meet her last time.”

“If the band is that way, we should definitely go back. They’ll see you when they’re ready.”

Adrien nodded, but froze. “Too late.”

Isabelle Ire was storming towards them down the hallway, all flowing skirts and impotent anger. Physically, she had left the argument, but her frustration continued. “Stop telling me to be open-minded about my own art! I know who my video needs!” 

So much for the band’s supposed creative control.

“Marinette.” Adrien’s voice sounded oddly strained. “Marinette, you need to run.”

She glanced from his face to where he appeared to be looking. 

Isabelle’s ire had attracted a nasty bug.

Marinette seized Adrien’s wrist. “Let’s go!”

He shook her off, fluidly moving himself between Marinette and Hawk Moth’s latest target. “Go. I’ll stall her ‘til Ladybug gets here.”

Heart in her throat, Marinette pivoted on the balls of her feet and ran. Ladybug was needed. She didn’t have the luxury of huddling in safety with her loved ones like any other citizen of Paris. To keep her identity a secret, she must separate herself from everyone else. For the greater good, she had to abandon the one person that mattered most. Marinette hoped whatever foolish notion of romantic heroism that caused him to sacrifice himself so that she could get away wouldn’t wear off. Should he wonder later why she’d left him to face an akuma victim alone, she wouldn’t be able to explain herself. 

Rounding the first corner she came across, Marinette accepted that a quick glance to make sure she was alone was all the security she could afford right now. “Tikki, spots on!” A second or so, and Tikki’s magic had done it’s work. Ladybug sprinted back down the way she had came.

Unfortunately, the akumas were just as efficient as kwamis. In the time it took to transform Marinette into Ladybug, Isabelle Ire had transformed into a many tentacled terror who now held Adrien aloft, dangling him by the ankle. It appeared the furious frontwoman of Isa and Asimov made for one of the more disobedient supervillains. Isabelle Eldritch was shrieking, and Ladybug could only guess it was due to Hawk Moth making demands she didn’t want to hear. “No! I won’t let him go! He’s perfect and now he’s mine!”

Yo-yo at the ready, Ladybug cried, “Put him down!”

“Stop telling me how to create! It’s my music! It’s my art! It’s my video! It needs him!”

“And he wants to be a part of the video,” Ladybug said, hoping desperation was not leaking through her voice. She was a hero. She needed to be firm and unafraid. “That’s why he came here today. But you are going to hurt him. Put him down.”

Incredulous, Isabelle Eldritch replied, “Of course I’m going to hurt him! That’s what I need him for! He’s pretty. They’ll be sad when we break him!” More tentacles (where were they even coming from?) engulfed Adrien.

Ladybug’s stomach roiled. “Lucky Charm!”

A single piece of chewing gum fell into her waiting hand, neatly bound up in red-with-black polka dot foil. How was _ chewing gum _ going to free Adrien?

“He’s mine,” Isabelle Eldritch sang. “Mine, mine. _ Perfect. _ Will break so nice.”

Ladybug wedged the chewing gum between the two sides of her yo-yo. Okay. Think. She had used Lucky Charm, so the countdown until she transformed back was in play. She couldn’t see anyway to use chewing gum or a small piece of foil. The akuma victim both had and was motivated to keep Adrien. Cat Noir was nowhere to be seen. She did not know what Isabelle’s akumatized object was.

If she hadn’t listened to Adrien, refused to run, then she would have seen where the akuma hid. It was hard to forgive herself, even knowing she could not have transformed if she’d stayed. 

First priority was Adrien’s safety. She had to convince Isabelle to let him go. The barrier to Adrien being cast in the video kept being called_ optics. _It was going to look bad for somebody. 

“He is young,” Ladybug said. “Rethink this: it might upset your fans to see him get hurt in one of your videos.”

_ “Art is supposed to resonate!” _

Okay, a no go.

Idea #2: Physically force her to let go. Ladybug swung her yo-yo around the mass of tentacles that had once been Isabelle’s arm. The yo-yo string constricted tightly, but did not appear to cause the akuma victim any discomfort. It just sort of sank into her soft flesh. Ladybug flicked her wrist to retract it, but the yo-yo didn’t budge. Learning all she could about the akuma victim’s transformed state was usually vital to a victory, but the knowledge that Isabelle Eldritch was both very soft and very sticky was not information Ladybug was pleased to uncover. 

Direct combat appeared pointless.

The yo-yo was stuck.

The Lucky Charm was inside the yo-yo.

Cat Noir still hadn’t shown up.

Isabelle didn’t want to hear arguments about why she couldn’t have Adrien.

Adrien, whose face had turned red from being held upside down. Adrien, who was so enveloped in tentacles that he could not even struggle.

Isabelle may not want to hear anyone’s arguments about why she couldn’t have Adrien, but maybe she could be convinced that _ she _ didn’t want him. “Nobody is perfect!” Ladybug tried. “Adrien…” Crap. Crap. Crap. There must be something not-optimal about Adrien, right? Ladybug tugged futilely on the yo-yo string. “Adrien has undignified taste!”

To her credit, Isabelle didn’t scream. She added nothing on the topic of her artistic vision. She mostly looked confused. Ladybug could relate. Kagami’s system of categorizing media as Dignified or Undignified struck her as completely arbitrary, too. 

A confused monster was an improvement on a monster that treated Adrien like a rag doll, though, so Ladybug continued. _ “You _ are a true artist! _ He _ just does what he’s told! If you want someone who will take the job seriously, pick someone else!”

Isabelle turned Adrien upright.

Keep going! Keep going! “Not that you’d want to hear anything he created! One time, he wrote a hip hop opera about Jacques Chirac and performed it with his friend. In public. Completely ridiculous and over the top!”

“Don’t betray me!” Isabelle howled. “You can’t take _ her _ side!” 

Ladybug tugged on her yo-yo string harder. “Adrien will always take my side!”

Isabelle roared at Ladybug. _ “I wasn’t talking to you!” _

The string finally retracted, calling the yo-yo to fly into Ladybug’s waiting palm. The smack of yo-yo against her hand was awfully satisfying, though it did retain an unpleasantly sticky residue. A quick peek assured her that the Lucky Charm was still safely sandwiched inside. 

Yet, despite the unflattering character Ladybug had given Adrien, Isabelle remained unconvinced. Apparently, she didn’t care that Adrien was undignified, over the top, wouldn’t take the job seriously and just followed the directions he was given, so accustomed to being controlled and corralled that despite his intelligence, he struggled to take initiative or solve problems himself. 

_ She’d mind it if she had to work with him..! _

Ladybug’s earrings beeped. The time limit was _ not _ on her side. “If we’re being honest,” she added, “he’s secretly just a huge dork.” 

The tentacles receded and Adrien fell. He landed hard on his feet, entire body folding over in a crouch which he sprung out of like a sprinter. Ladybug ran to him. “I need to get you out of here.”

Breathing hard, Adrien nodded. “I like that plan!”

She scooped Adrien into her arms (bridal-style, sure, whatever, this is about _ urgency, _ thank you) and ran into the first room she saw. The people within were, unsurprisingly, eating lunch. One dropped a steaming cup of tea on the floor when they saw the commotion. “Sorry, sorry, pardon me!” Ladybug went straight for the window, kicked it out of the frame and pushed Adrien outside. Isabelle Eldritch, having apparently rethought some of her choices, was coming in fast behind them. Luckily, her monsterous form was a good deal harder to navigate than that of a teenager with super agility. Ladybug jumped out the window after Adrien, slung one arm around his back and used the other to launch her yo-yo at the building across the street. 

By now, Ladybug was well-acquainted with the rooftops of Paris. Several stories up was the preferred road for a superhero. People had a tendency to never look _ up. _ They looked ahead, or at their shoes, or at nothing really, focused more on what was going on inside their own minds. Height meant safety—drawing akuma victims away from populated streets and unseen transformations. It meant speed. It meant…

“You’re good here, right?” Ladybug asked, releasing Adrien in the shadows of a wide chimney. “I need to get back there.”

“You’re just going to leave me here?” He sounded like he was having some trouble believing her.

“Yeah.”

He hadn’t run away with Marinette. He hadn’t even tried. From the moment he spotted that akuma, he chose to sacrifice himself so that she could transform with plausible deniability.

“I think you can get down on your own.” If she was wrong, she must sound so callous. What would a regular citizen think, having a superhero treat them that way? “If you can’t, I’ll come back and get you later.”

Their eyes met in a silent stand-off. The possibility of Ladybug being wrong, slim as it was, meant she could not simply say it. And he couldn't ask, not as Adrien, not without knowing if the conclusion she'd reached was the one he wanted. For all he knew, Ladybug could just be talking about stairs. 

She broke first. “So. Uh. Bye for now, I guess.”

Ladybug threw her yo-yo and zipped back across the rooftops to where they’d left Isabelle Eldritch, finding her way back to the kicked-out window frame with much more speed than she ever would have been able to navigate the inside of that building.

It would be nice if more akuma victims were like Max and freely gave up their butterfly. But Isabelle Eldritch, having lost first her image of perfect Adrien and then Adrien himself, was not repenting. She simply found something new to crave. “Give me your Miraculous!”

“I know that song!” Cat Noir vaulted through the same empty window Ladybug herself had just nearly flown through. “It’ll never be a hit. Stick with your own style.”

Isabelle Eldritch lurged towards him. Cat Noir was faster, dodging every lash of tentacles with practiced ease.

While her partner kept their opponent occupied, Ladybug made a beeline for the lunch spread. Much like the corn syrup used to make fake blood, Isabelle Eldritch was sticky. A quick remedy for stickiness? Hot water and hand sanitizer. An electric kettle boiled the water for that fallen cup of tea, and hand sanitizer was a must where a large group of people were eating. Ladybug grabbed both and pumped hand sanitizer into the kettle.

Her eyes flickered to Cat Noir. He was still dancing out of the way of tentacles.

He wore a ring on the third finger of his right hand, something she had never seen him go without—except, she _ had, _ because _ she _ was the one wearing it during the battle with Reflekta and Reflekdoll.   
He was a fencer.  
He went to her school.  
His pupils were slits and the sclera was lime green, but the irises—that was Adrien’s green.  
And that was Adrien’s jaw, and those were Adrien’s lips and that messy mop of blond hair was Adrien’s hair, and it wasn’t even that messy—just a touch longer than usual and parted down the middle instead of on the side.

How had she been so blind? His voice didn’t even change!

Ladybug’s earrings beeped. Focus! She pulled the gum out of her yo-yo, unwrapped it and began to furiously chew in time with shaking the electric kettle. When the water and hand sanitizer solution was mixed and the gum was thoroughly chewed, Ladybug dashed to where Chat Noir was dodging and teasing Isabelle Eldritch and doused her with the water. As the akuma-provided body began to lose its consistency and lose its shape, Ladybug stuck the gum onto her yo-yo and used it to fish out the object Isabelle had been hiding within her goo.

A headshot of Adrien. Of course. 

Ladybug tore it in half, straight down the middle, and out flew the akuma. “No more evil doing for you!”

While she captured and purified the akuma, then repaired the damage to the studio, Cat Noir huddled by Isabelle Ire’s side. Akuma victims were usually disoriented after being freed from Hawk Moth, but Isabelle Ire was not given that luxury. “Big fan!” he gushed. “Let’s get a selfie!”

Well, Cat Noir may have all the time in the world for a photo shoot, but Ladybug did not. Exasperated, she hissed, “You want to mug for the camera _ now?” _

He held an arm out, first for a fist bump, and once Ladybug had given him that, motioned rapidly with his palm for her to get in the shot. Ladybug stepped forward, fitting neatly under his arm. The three of them huddled together and Cat Noir snapped a selfie using his baton camera, then Isabelle did the same with her phone. Bouncing on his toes, Cat Noir added, “Put it on Instagram!”

“Okay, yes, thank you, we have to go. Come _ on, _ kitten.” Ladybug grabbed him by the tail and started pulling Cat Noir toward the window. This time, she _ opened _ the window, and they climbed out without breaking anything. 

“You gotta give the people what they want, Bugaboo.”

_ “You’re _ the one who wanted a selfie.”

“So she can put it on social media! How are the people of Paris supposed to trust superheroes if we disappear the second the fight is over and they never know anything about us? We need to have a presence, show them we’re accessible. It builds trust.”

How had she never realized he was a legit celebrity before? He had always had an interest she’d been unable to share in defining their brand. Ladybug had only ever prioritized assuring Paris that she was there, doing her job, protecting them. (And the occasional interview with Alya, but that was motivated by friendship more so than a desire to disseminate information.) Cat Noir felt visibility was demanded of them. It was why he pushed to go on Nadja Chamack’s talk show.

They fled to a rooftop about two blocks away. The appearance of the heroes fleeing the scene after a battle was maintained, but they were still close by. Adrien had to be back in time for his audition, after all. 

Cat Noir seemed unsure of himself now that he’d run out of things to say about their brand. Ladybug couldn’t blame him. He’d thought she’d figured out his identity at least twice before and been wrong. Could he trust that Ladybug abandoning Adrien was what it seemed? 

_ Did _ she know?

Or did she just _ think _ she knew, and there was a stranded civilian she claimed to love waiting for her on another rooftop?

She knew. 

She _ absolutely _ knew. 

First things first. Ladybug crossed the distance between them in one sideways sweep of her legs, smoothed her palms up his chest and around his neck, pushed herself onto her tiptoes and kissed him. 

Cat Noir gave a little squeak of surprise—it was _ adorable _—before sinking into her embrace. Kissing Cat Noir was a lot like kissing Adrien—the pressure of his lips, his scent, the steadiness of his arms around her—all of that was familiar. But it was also different. His bangs brushed her face. She could feel his claws when he put his hand on her waist. There was no pressure. He would never scratch her, but they were unmistakably there.

He was _ purring. _

A fission of magic shimmied down her spine. It took far too long for Marinette to realize it wasn’t him that made her feel that way. They’d stood kissing on the rooftop through Ladybug’s transformation running out. Marinette reluctantly parted from Cat Noir. He looked dazed. Drunk on love, his eyes were only able to open halfway, dopey smile on his lips. A blush crept down his cheeks from beneath his mask. 

No! She’d pulled herself away to tend to Tikki, not admire what kisses did to Cat Noir!

(He really was just unfairly pretty, though.)

“Sorry, Tikki.” She fished a macaron out of her purse.

“Thank you.” Tikki held it in both arms and took a small bite.

Cat Noir blinked owlishly, as though he’d plum forgotten that a transformation back to Marinette meant they were no longer alone. “Hi, Tikki.”

“Hello, Cat Noir. How are you today?”

He bounced on his feet. “I’m _ fantastic, _ thanks. Best day ever!”

Marinette wrinkled her nose. “You aren’t mad about all that stuff I said, are you?”

Cat Noir turned to Marinette. “What stuff?”

“I told Isabelle Ire you’re a dork!”

“M’lady, I _ am _ a dork.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Sometimes people get so caught up in the brand that they don’t see past what I’m selling far enough to see me. I’m used to that.” 

Marinette hid her eyes behind her palms, fingernails digging into her forehead. “I was one of those people. Until a second ago, _ I _ was one of those people. I thought I loved you, but all I saw was the image in my own head.”

Cat Noir gently laid his hands on her shoulders. “Hey. That’s not what’s important right now. What matters is if you’re okay with _ that _ guy being _ this _ guy, too.” 

Tears were pooling under her hands. “I hurt you.”

His arms came swiftly around her, tugging Marinette firmly against his chest. “That’s not...this isn’t about me.”

“Of course this is about you! It’s entirely about you! I made you feel _invisible!”_

“But you see me now.”

Marinette pried her hands away from her eyes to hug him. His shoulder was solid beneath her cheek. “Isabelle Ire was so fixated on Adrien because she thought he was perfect. Fighting her wasn’t working so I started listing every fault I could think of. When I heard myself say it, I knew who I was talking about.”

“So you just had to rubber duck me, Bug.”

Trust Cat Noir to try and make her laugh when she was crying. (She did laugh, but also.) Despite his best efforts, the tears wouldn’t stop.

Hesitantly, he asked, “Marinette, is this okay? I know you kissed me, but… If this changes things too much, you can tell me.” He swallowed so hard she felt the motion shudder through his body. “I can take it. I can.”

“I’m so sorry, kitten.”

Cat Noir bowed his head. Hot tears dripped off his face and into her neck. “Okay. _ Okay.” _

She pressed her body firmly against his, fingers digging into his back. “It’s not that..it isn’t that at all, I love you so much, my kitten. I’m just sorry for everything.” 

Skeptical, he wondered, “And Cat Noir..?”

“Is good. It’s amazing. I’m so happy and so _ dumb!” _

“Don’t call my wonderful girlfriend who I love dumb.”

She looked up. “You weren’t exactly subtle.”

“I _ tried _ to be, but I didn’t want to lie to you.” 

Marinette raised her eyebrows. “You came to my house as Cat Noir and started asking questions about my boyfriend.”

“Maybe I just like hearing you talk about how you’re in love with me!”

Who told him the umbrella story?_ She had. _

Who in her social circle was friends with Cat Noir? All of them. Some, like Nino, Kagami and Chloe, were really his friends first. 

But Marinette wasn’t thinking of the umbrella story. She meant when he landed on the roof, and Cat Noir knew that. “I _ meant _ to transform back and knock on the front door like a normal person. But you caught me on the way down, so I had to improvise.” 

It was embarrassing how some things were still clicking into place. “Transforming is how you sneak out.”

“Yup.”

Tikki piped in. “You shouldn’t use your powers for personal gain, Adrien.”

“It’s not—okay, it _ is _, but I don’t know how to justify myself because when Plagg tells me not to, he’s just being lazy.” 

Another realization—Plagg had been present and hiding throughout her entire relationship with Adrien. Tikki, too, except Adrien knew Tikki was there, but could only speak to her as Cat Noir. And Tikki! She’d been shipping Ladybug and Cat Noir, telling Marinette she’d like him if she only knew. Marinette groaned. She must have been driving all three of them nuts! “You all must be so relieved I finally caught on.”

“I’m _ happy _ for _ your sake, _ Marinette,” Tikki sniffed. “And Plagg will be, too.”

“I’m good if you are,” Cat Noir added.

Her tears were in large part tears of repentance, but it was not only regret for failing to see him that made her cry. “I’m good. I’m great. I’m so relieved you're you.”

He pursed his lips. “Okay?”

“I thought Adrien was perfect, too. And I felt so much pressure—not from you, from me—to deserve you. Like one day, you’d just wake up and realize you deserve someone as perfect as you are. But you aren’t perfect. _ You’re my kitten. _And I’m your lady, and we’re already perfect for each other.” 

He melted. “I love it when you call me yours.”

“My kitten—” (he started purring again, just from her _ words _) “—how did you figure out Marinette is Ladybug?”

“Oh, so now you want to know?” Cat Noir waggled his brow. 

Marinette nodded. Knowing had been terrifying before, as if she’d have to chase shadows hot on Cat Noir’s trail at every second once she knew where they were. But if he thought no one could figure it out the way he did, she trusted him.

“I fell in love with Marinette.”

She cupped his cheek in her hand.

“At first,” Cat Noir continued, emboldened by her affection, “I lied to myself about it. And when I couldn’t do that anymore, I was mad. I’d been in love with Ladybug since we met—am! currently!—but I couldn’t stop thinking about Marinette. Every time you walked into the room or just _ breathed _ in a room you were already in, I was a total goner. I thought I didn’t deserve either of you. Who could love someone so fickle? And then one day, I was thinking about what if I just kissed Marinette—I didn’t like that I was thinking about that, but I was and I wasn’t gonna stop—and I just realized it. I wasn’t some unfaithful jerk who wanted two girls. _ She’s just the one girl.” _

“But you needed to be sure.”

“I was sure! But, um, yes, the what-ifs were driving me crazy. I lasted two, maybe three days before I just had to _ check. _And then we were at the Luc Besson fest and I thought you were telling me you’d figured it out, too. You were there! You know what happened! You let me kiss you! It was awesome! 10 out of 10, would kiss again, over and over forever.”

Marinette giggled. She couldn’t help it.

“And do you want to know what the craziest part is?”

“I do, yeah.” Mostly out of curiosity over how he could begin to pick a single, craziest part of their utterly absurd but also miraculous lives.

“I always thought—daydreamed, hoped—that someday Ladybug would fall for Cat Noir. I figured _ Adrien _ would be the hard sell. Fall in love with a superhero and then—surprise, here’s this doofus. _ Please like him. _That’s why I went along with Aspik. I thought it was my chance to get you to like the real me.”

Marinette flicked his bell. Resisting the temptation to play with his bell was going to impossible from here on out, wasn’t it? “Why wouldn’t I love the real you?”

“Claws in.” The bell and the cat eyes vanished. No more purring, no more claws. Just Adrien. Exposed. Plagg rose silently from the ring, seemingly aware he’d been released for a reason. “So. Here’s the real me. I’m not allowed out of my house. I have to fight every day just to go to school. For most of my life, I had one friend. One. And she’s not a very nice person. Everything I know about interacting with other people I learned from anime.”

As extremely true as all of that was… “That’s not who you are. Adrien Agreste is kind, and gentle, and optimistic, and loyal, and trusting, and a word play loving dork. Master Fu picked you because he knew all the qualities of a good kitty were inside you. Always. All the time. You don’t become Cat Noir when you transform. You’re always just the one boy. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see it or I can’t see it. You’re _ you, _ and nobody ever gets to take that away.” 

Adrien pressed his face into her hair. She held him tightly as his tears flowed.

“I can’t tell if I should be angry at her or not,” Plagg muttered.

Tikki hissed, “Not! They’re having a moment. It’s touching!”

“Gross.”

Some time and a few shuddering breaths later, Adrien said, “I didn’t know owners of the Black Cat Miraculous had to be word play loving dorks.”

Marinette ran her fingers through his hair. “They don’t _ have _ to be. But the best ones are.”

“Speaking of…” He pulled his phone out of his back pocket and scrolled through his contacts. “You can see this now.”

Beside her phone number read Marinette 🐜👻.

_ “Don’t save me as Bugaboo in your phone!” _

He burst out laughing. “What’s done is done!”

“Ooh! Just for that, I’m going to change your name in my phone!” Marinette pulled her phone out of her purse and begin editing. “Take that!”

She thrust the phone at him. No more was 💕Adrien💖. 

He looked at his new designation.

😸Adrien😽.

He puffed his cheeks out in confusion. “But I _ like _ that.”

Marinette rolled her eyes. “That’s why I did it!”

“Uh-oh.” His eyes flicked up at another display on her phone. “Look at the time.”

“On the bright side,” Marinette replied, “we did get out of the studio. We just need to get back on street level, find a cafe, and get back in time for you to crush that audition.”

“I dunno if I’ll crush it. _ Somebody _ told _ Isabelle Ire _ I’m a _ dork.” _

It was hard to defend herself through her laughter. “Because you are!”

* * *

There were few certainties in life, but Marinette knew this: she needed a bigger cork board. If she took down the photo of the school garden, then she’d have somewhere to put the group picture from Juleka’s birthday party, but the garden would change over time and she definitely wanted to be able to document that…

The recoil of the mattress tossed her up, and back down. Cat Noir pressed his forehead against her in greeting and Marinette reached out to scratch him on the head. He closed the trap door, then kissed her on the cheek. “New pictures?”

“Yeah.” 

“Have you ever done any swimsuit design?”

Marinette couldn’t quite follow his train of thought, but it was a fair question, given her predilections. “No, why?”

“We’re gearing up for the release of the summer collection at Gabriel. My first swimsuit shoot of the year is in two weeks. But if you’re not into swimsuit design, I guess you wouldn’t be interested in those pictures…”

There had apparently been push pins in her mouth because they just fell out.

“I smell snacks.” Cat Noir disappeared down the bannister.

“I need them!” Marinette cried, leaning over the railing. Plagg floated passed her, headed for the balcony with a wedge of cheese in his arms and disgusted look on his face. 

Adrien laughed around his cookies.

“Something else we need,” Marinette added, “I’ve been thinking we need a secret hideout.”

Craning his neck to look up at the loft, Adrien grinned. “A superhero base? Yes! I’m 100% for that! Doesn’t seem like your style, though—Oh. You just want more space to hang pictures.”

“We could also have Find Hawk Moth meetings there! But don’t you get tired of locking all our cute Polaroids up?” The Cloud could be hacked, so snapping photos of Ladybug and Adrien or Cat Noir and Marinette on their phones had been dismissed immediately. Taking selfies with the yo-yo or baton was fine, but they couldn’t print them. The retro mania for Polaroid cameras provided them with the means to safely take pictures, but once they had them, there was nothing to be done with them. It was natural to be a fan of your local superheroes, so she could get away with displaying one photo of Cat Noir and Ladybug, but it couldn’t be a romantic one. Going public with their relationship felt like begging Hawk Moth to pit them against each other with mind-control akumas. Cat Noir had protested against lying to their public, but Ladybug had a solution to everything: He would say he had a girlfriend in his civilian life that he would never two-time, and she would stick with her usual lines about how inappropriate it was to discuss their personal lives. 

Other photos were out of the question. There was no explaining a photo of Ladybug sitting cross-legged on Adrien’s bed with a game controller in her hand. Cat Noir asleep on her balcony lounge chair while Marinette photobombed him with puckered lips was under strict lock and key. 

Adrien tapped two fingers against his chin. “Maybe Master Fu knows a place or...how about the Catacombs?”

With all the old skeletons? “Creepy.”

Adrien stood proudly. “I think it suits me.”

“Anyway, would be discovered. Too many people like to snoop down there.”

“Cataphiles.” He nodded sagely. “_You’d _ know.”

Marinette grabbed a pillow off her bed and chucked it at him.

The pillow hit him on the head, but Adrien only laughed. He grabbed a pen and pad of yellow sticky notes off her desk. “I’ll add it to the To-Do list!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The End!
> 
> Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Random Bits and Walla:
> 
> 1) This story takes place in 2015. Which means the film I actually want them to see is not out yet, and I will have to settle for other films by the same director. Alas.  
2) Fictional Brit indie band Isa and Asimov is based on Real Brit indie band Florence and the Machine. I may have Googled "popular bands in 2015" and based the fake band off of the first one I was familiar with.  
3) Max's computer programmer friend Ada, her akumatized form Lovelace and Hello, World bracelet are all a reference to Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer. (Or in the case of the bracelet, a programming language named after Ada Lovelace.)


End file.
